A disastrous end: how The Breeders spent $500,000 on ‘Title TK’
What are the good times? Will we ever know? Probably not. If we start to learn what the good times are, then life becomes far too straightforward, and it was never meant to be easy. That being said, it would be nice to know when we’re in a happy moment to make the most of it rather than looking back and pining for the time once it has passed. The Breeders probably feel this way when they reminisce about the success of Last Splash, especially given how things went downhill almost immediately after.
Last Splash was released in 1993 and is The Breeders’ most successful album. Call it a combination of excellent musicianship and good timing as the LP landed amid the rock boom, meaning the market was certainly there, and people were buying what The Breeders were selling. The album ended up going platinum, and it looked as though the outfit had a promising future ahead of them. However, the highs of Last Splash marked the beginning of the end as things steadily started to decline.
After the success of the record, members of the band started to have problems with drugs and alcohol, which led to friction in the group and resulted in a forced hiatus in 1994. Different members tried to release music here and there as Kim Deal formed The Amps, a short-lived outfit that released the album Pacer, which received mixed reviews. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that Kim and Kelley Deal reformed The Breeders with a new line-up, and they began working on the third album.
At this point, the spark had gone, as the album recording process was messy, and there didn’t seem to be anything the band could do to make good music anymore. Different members became fixated on different things, and without any direction, they started haemorrhaging money.
The drums were one of the album’s elements that Kim could never shake. She became obsessed with trying to achieve the perfect drum sound and, in doing so, fell down a percussion-based rabbit hole that she struggled to get out of. She ended up learning the drums herself to discover the perfect sound, and whether she was ever happy with the result is still unknown.
By the time the record was finished, the band had spent more than $500,000, and the final product left much to be desired. Title TK received mixed reviews and didn’t perform commercially well. Granted, there are a lot of fans of the group who stand by the record, but there is no denying that it falls flat compared to some of their earlier material. The Breeders were also victims of the digital age, as around the time of the album’s release, people stopped buying records, and as the music industry adapted, bands lost a lot of money.
There was no way that The Breeders could have known how limited their time as a band was following the success of Last Splash, but that tends to happen with many outfits. The music industry is so filled with highs and lows that it can often be difficult to tell the two apart. Despite their successful career and the excellent music they put out, The Breeder’s ending was a messy one that most members would likely sooner forget.
Since then, the band have reformed and put out another album, but not after a turbulent time together in the 1990s and 2000s.
