It’s time to go back to the 1990’s, which I’m known to do a hell of a lot. Today I’m going to look at one now-lost aspect of album releases specific to the CD format – the hidden track.

The hidden track came into life when the CD became the dominant format in music. It was really easy to tack some extra, unlisted crap on to an album. This could happen before the CD of course, but it really became a thing in the early ’90’s. Sometimes these were bonus songs, other times they were epilogues or outro pieces that weren’t “proper” songs. And in some cases it was simply goofing off.

It honestly was pretty easy to identify an album with hidden tracks – many albums inserted several tracks of silence and put the bonus track at a later number, like 69 (nice) or 99. If you put a CD in and the player said there were 99 tracks, you knew there was mischief to be found. Not everyone did this, though – sometimes these tracks were just added on at the end, but would still display 15 as opposed to the listed 14.

Today I’m going to visit a handful of hidden tracks that I specifically remember. I’m not going to do a deep dive on the matter as a whole – there are a ton of albums with this kind of thing. Check out the Wikipedia list for a not-even complete accounting of hidden tracks. Just be aware that the streaming era has essentially “unhidden” these songs, and that different CD reissues have also exposed them on track listings or even removed them in some cases.

Ozzy Osbourne – Hero

This first example comes from 1988 and was honestly just a straightforward bonus track, unlisted but added to the CD and tape copies of No Rest For The Wicked. It is a full-on song that was unlisted for reasons unclear to me. It was written by the same group that wrote the rest of the album so this wasn’t Sharon trying to hide money from people as she loves to do. The song is pretty good, I don’t necessarily get why they did it this way but I guess it came off as a nice bonus when you played the album the first time.

Danzig – Mother

Mother was originally a song on Danzig’s first solo album but it would come back to prominence several years later on the Thrall-Demonsweatlive EP. This version launched Danzig into a brief period of MTV fame in 1993. There is a live version of Mother that is the EP’s last listed song. Then, on certain CD pressings, many tracks of silence played until track 93, where a re-recorded version of Mother appeared.

This one is interesting as this hidden track is actually the version used as the single. The song played on the famous video isn’t the live cut, it’s this re-recorded studio track. I’m not sure how subsequent CD pressings may have handled this odd bit of sequencing.

Danzig would use the hidden track trick on his next album IV – there is an invocation tacked on at track 66.

For more about this EP, check out my past review of it here (oddly, one of my most popular posts).

Sepultura – Clenched Fist

Clenched Fist isn’t the hidden track here – it’s the final song on Chaos A.D. After a quick moment of silence, a hidden gag pops up that is the band members laughing manically. Hearing it for the first time was massively unsettling and it is a vivid memory even over 30 years removed. There were a lot of these hidden tracks that were goof off type stuff, this one was pretty funny and somewhat disturbing.

I have previously covered Chaos A.D. in full.

Marilyn Manson – Empty Sounds Of Hate

I know Marilyn Manson can be a heated topic of discussion but today I’m confining the topic to this hidden track, which I believe is significant to this topic. This is another track buried by silence, this is track 99, while tracks 17 through 98 are varying lengths of quiet. This is found on Manson’s 1996 album Antichrist Superstar, which is a concept album and also part of a conceptual trilogy.

This piece is a brief one that serves as both an outro and intro – it opens with an extension of the album’s final track Man That You Fear, then goes into a minute or so of distorted speaking and ambient noise. At the track’s conclusion, it goes into a different spoken sequence that ties back into the beginning of the album with Irresponsible Hate Anthem. It’s not essential by any means to the album’s story but it does provide a nice bit of spice and lore to things, essentially looping everything back around.

Note that this one sometimes bears the title Empty Sound Of Hate and other times, such as on streaming services, is listed as Untitled.

Overkill – Rehearsal Jam

On their 1994 album W.F.O., Overkill tacked on a neat little bonus. And this one is actually a bit of a chore to get to. The album proper is 11 tracks, while tracks 12 through 95 are each a few seconds of silence. Track 96 is also silent but runs for nearly 3 minutes. Then track 97 really screws with you – it’s a whopping 9 minutes of nothing. I don’t know the reasoning behind that, but it’s kind of a baffling thing. It’s not just a hidden track, this stuff is buried in silence.

Track 98 is where the action is. After yet another minute of nothing, we get a rehearsal clip featuring bits of a few cover songs. We get bits of Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell, Judas Priest’s The Ripper and Voodoo Child from Jimi Hendrix.

After this little informal jam, we get the real main event – track 99 with another 4 seconds of silence. Then the album is finally over.

This one is more of an idle curiosity and more so for the bizarre sequencing rather than the actual jam. The rehearsal is fine, there’s nothing special about it and I guess it’s a nice little easter egg. But the mind boggles at how this was laid out.

Nine Inch Nails – Physical and Suck

We get a few hidden tracks on an EP here, that being the hallowed 1992 Broken set which was a molten slab of industrial metal. In keeping with Nine Inch Nails, the circumstances on these are, of course, weird.

There are two hidden tracks that are both cover songs. Physical is a cover of an Adam And The Ants song and is straightforward, nothing weird to discuss here. The other track is a cover of the song Suck by Pigface. This one is a bit odd, as Trent Reznor was once a writing partner for Pigface and was a primary songwriter of the track. There were different versions of the song around, one pre-dating Reznor’s involvement with Pigface, and the inclusion of the song on Broken coupled with Reznor’s writing credit caused some issues.

The really weird part of this is that you get wildly different versions of the album depending on what you buy. If you get this on vinyl, you get the hidden tracks as a separate 7-inch record. On cassette, the tracks are simply listed and aren’t really “hidden.” On CD is where it gets really screwy – first versions of the EP put the hidden tracks on a separate three-inch disc, while later issues put the songs on as hidden tracks with many tracks of silence between them and the EP proper. Some versions of the EP also don’t list the last “real” song Gave Up and it sort of becomes a hidden track on only those oddball copies. And there are other track list discrepancies across different formats that I won’t get into here. It’s kind of a collector’s landmine getting into this one – honestly, just find a version and go with it.

I discussed this EP not long into starting this blog, this blurb I did today is almost as long as my full review earlier. Probably not a good thing but I’m not keeping track.

Cracker – Euro-Trash Girl

Our final entry is easily the most significant of these tracks. On their 1993 album Kerosene Hat, alt-rockers Cracker offered up no less than three hidden tracks. There was an actual reason for this – the record label was concerned about having too many songs on the album, so Cracker chose to do their remaining material unlisted. The song I Ride My Bike is a pretty cool song, then the final bit is a snippet of the title track in acoustic fashion.

But the star of the show is the first hidden track, Euro-Trash Girl. It’s a twangy track about a guy who is over in Europe trying to find his dream girl, but winds up in a bunch of crappy situations instead. This unfortunate story goes on for over 8 minutes and the guy never gets his girl.

Euro-Trash Girl quickly became hot among the fanbase and the song wound up released as a single. It is today Cracker’s third most-played live song, just behind their two singles Low and Teen Angst.

This one is also kind of funny since both Euro-Trash Girl and I Ride My Bike were previously released on an EP the year before. But it took being included as hidden cuts on the album with their biggest hit to get real traction, then one song becomes a beloved fan favorite. Music can be funny stuff sometimes.

Those are a handful of hidden tracks that stand out most to me. I know many of you were into music in the same era and probably have some funny or favorite hidden track moments that stick out for you, let me know below what you recall from the wild and crazy era of CD track sequencing.