“Happy anniversary to Last Splash! You guys still like us, huh?” Kim Deal laughs. Thirty years later, the Breeders' 1993 indie classic still feels fresh, still gets played loud, and still, as it turns out, has some secrets left to reveal. The band—Kim, her twin sister Kelly Deal, Josephine Wiggs, and Jim MacPherson—are marking the milestone with a deluxe edition, a high-fidelity remaster, and a little detective work that led them to recover long-lost recordings.
“People want to hear it, and they still want to come to the shows after 30 years,” Kim says, genuinely surprised. “I mean, I'm impressed with that. And I’m in the middle of it.”
The making of Last Splash has its own mythology. Stories of studio experimentation, happy accidents, and whatever you want to call “fixing problems” are all part of the album’s DNA. Kim swears they weren’t trying to be weird. “At the time, it’s not like, ‘Let’s do a lot of experimentation.’ It’s like, ‘Jim’s cymbals sound too ringy. Let’s throw them off the second floor to deaden them.’ That’s just practical.”
If Pod, their debut album, was a lo-fi side project with a skeletal, Albini-raw sound, Last Splash was a bigger, stranger beast. The Deal sisters had more control, more ideas, and, apparently, more things to toss off a balcony. “For Pod, we recorded less complex sessions than what we just did right now,” Kim jokes. “This right here was harder than Pod.”
They embraced a trial-and-error process that sometimes led to magic. “Remember Happiness Is a Warm Gun?” Kelly asks. “The first thing you hear is Steve Albini flicking his Bic lighter. Why? Because it sounded cool.” That approach carried into Last Splash, from crunchy basslines to otherworldly guitar tones, the kinds of sounds that made it stand out against the backdrop of grunge.
Then there’s Cannonball, the song that shouldn’t have been a hit but somehow was. “At the time, do you think I ever thought that song would be played on the radio?” Kim shakes her head. “It’s got that weird bass slide intro, then just a hi-hat, and then the vocal comes in like a kid making sounds with their mouth.”
Kelly jumps in: “The one guy called it the most unfriendly radio intro ever. And he’s probably right.”
“But it worked,” Kim says, grinning. “People would sing along to every little part—doot doot!—even though it’s weird. Every bit of it is the greatest thing in that little moment.”
That whole moment—the “weird ‘90s”—felt like a rare window of opportunity. This was the era when Ren & Stimpy was a mainstream cartoon, so, yeah, I guess Cannonball made sense on the radio. But success was relative. “They still don’t play us on TV in Dayton.”
A few decades later, Last Splash needed a proper remaster, which led to a problem: where the hell were the original tapes? “Beggars Banquet—bless ‘em—lost our analog masters,” Kim deadpans.
“They had one job,” Kelly adds.
The band needed those original half-inch stereo masters to do a high-resolution remaster at Abbey Road Studios. Beggars, their label, couldn’t find them. “So we called up Sarah, our manager, and she knew some dude at Warner Bros.,” Kelly says. “Turns out Elektra had them the whole time.”
Kim throws her hands up. “How do you just ‘misplace’ one of the greatest albums of all time?!”
The recovered tapes led to some surprises—like Go Man Go, a song they had no memory of recording. “Did we demo it?” Kim asks.
“You said no earlier,” Josephine reminds her.
Jim shakes his head. “I think we just made it up in the studio. An experiment.”
“That’s what we’re calling it? An experiment?” Kim laughs. “It was just… a thing we did and then forgot about.”
Then there’s Divine Mascus, an alternate take of Divine Hammer featuring J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. singing lead. “We sent J the two-inch master tapes, expecting rad guitars,” Kim explains. “He sends it back, and surprise—he sang the whole thing.”
Kelly chimes in. “It’s so funny to hear now. Like, why did we even let someone else sing our song?”
J’s recording inadvertently saved them years later. “A tape op accidentally erased part of Do You Love Me Now? when we were mixing,” Kim says. “The only way we could fix it was by using J’s copy of the tapes. So not only is he a Guitar Hero, he’s just a hero.”
Kim has more music on the way, with a solo album expected next year. The Breeders also have shows coming up, including dates with Belly. Tanya Donelly, a former member, has an open invitation to join them on stage. “We’ve tried to get her to pick up a guitar, but she won’t,” Kim says.
“We did have her sing Happiness Is a Warm Gun in Boston,” Kelly adds. “She completely train-wrecked it.”
Kim grins. “It wasn’t us this time.”
“That’s why we need a redemption arc,” Kelly says. “We’ll beg her to come back.”
At 30, Last Splash remains a classic, its quirks and imperfections only adding to its legend. “I love that people still care about this record,” Kim says. “We didn’t overthink it back then, and we’re definitely not gonna start now.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
