Professional ratings
Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
Metacritic	69/100
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic
Billboard	Favorable
Robert Christgau
Entertainment Weekly	B
Kerrang!
NME	5/10
PopMatters	Mixed
Q
The Rolling Stone Album Guide
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Beautiful Garbage (stylized as beautifulgarbage) is the third studio album by American-Scottish alternative rock band Garbage, released on September 27, 2001 by Mushroom Records. Marking a departure from the sound Garbage had established on their first two albums, Beautiful Garbage was written and recorded over the course of a year, during which time lead singer Shirley Manson chronicled their efforts weekly online, becoming one of the first high-profile musicians to keep an Internet blog. The album is marked by expanding on the musical variety, with stronger melodies, more direct lyrics, and sounds that mix rock with electronica, new wave, hip hop, and girl groups. The album's title is taken directly from a lyric in the song "Celebrity Skin" by Hole.

Released three weeks after the September 11 attacks, the album suffered from lack of promotion, mixed reaction from critics, and the failure of its lead single "Androgyny" to achieve high chart positions. Despite faltering in major markets, Beautiful Garbage debuted at number 13 on the Billboard 200, while topping the albums chart in Australia and peaking within the top 10 in multiple European countries. It was named one of Rolling Stone's "Top 10 Albums of the Year".

The origins of Beautiful Garbage came from a three-day September 1999 recording session during Garbage's world tour in support of their second album Version 2.0. The sessions resulted in "Silence Is Golden" and "Til the Day I Die", which were written for a proposed B-sides album. Both songs were loose and organic, contrasting the very dense layered production that featured on Version 2.0. "Silence Is Golden" in particular had been written with an odd structure for a Garbage song: a 6/8 shuffle that progressed to a straight 4/4 beat.

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