The Heavy – Short Change Hero (This Ain’t No Place For No Hero)

The Cat Litter Footsteps That Launched A Gaming Legend

Released on October 5, 2009, as the fifth track on the album The House That Dirt Built, “Short Change Hero” never charted as a single but became one of the most recognized rock songs of the 2010s through film, television, and video game placements. The song peaked at number 109 on the French Singles Chart in 2012 after Borderlands 2 made it famous worldwide. By 2025, the track had amassed over 188 million streams on Spotify. For a Bath, England band mixing soul, funk, and garage rock, this was vindication through the back door, proving sometimes the biggest hits never need radio play.

The track became the main theme for Borderlands 2 in 2012, opening the game’s cinematic sequence and immediately establishing the post-apocalyptic Western tone of Pandora’s lawless frontier. It also served as the opening theme for the Cinemax action series Strike Back starting in its second season. The song appeared in Batman: Arkham City trailers, the Dwayne Johnson film Faster, and television shows including Suits, The Umbrella Academy, The Vampire Diaries, and Longmire. When The Heavy performed their other hit “How You Like Me Now?” on Late Night with David Letterman, the host asked them to play more, the first time that had ever happened on his show.

Frontman Kelvin Swaby wrote the song about his fifteen-year-old relative who had fallen into trouble with police during Britain’s rising youth crime wave, a period marked by knife violence and deaths. Swaby was at an airport with guitarist Dan Taylor when inspiration struck. He started humming a beat, showed it to Taylor, and the guitarist immediately played something that sounded straight out of a Western. They decided to make it feel like an Ennio Morricone soundtrack, evoking the imagery of a bad guy walking into town only to be run out. Those iconic opening footsteps that sound like cowboy boots? Dan Taylor walked through clean cat litter in the studio to get that crunchy, gritty texture.

Producer Jim Abbiss, known for his work with Arctic Monkeys and Adele, recorded the track during 2009 sessions at Toy Box Studios in Bristol and State of the Ark in Richmond, London. The band consisted of Kelvin Swaby on lead vocals, Dan Taylor on guitar and backing vocals, Spencer Page on bass, and Chris Ellul on drums. Noisettes singer Shingai Shoniwa added backing vocals to three tracks on the album including this one, a collaboration born from their shared festival performances. The five-minute, 22-second track features raw, distorted guitars, pulsing bass, and that distinctive blend of blues, soul, and rock that made The Heavy stand out in an era dominated by indie rock.

The song appeared on The House That Dirt Built, the band’s second studio album, which referenced the nursery rhyme This Is the House That Jack Built. The album initially sold modestly but gained momentum after their Letterman appearance, which boosted sales by 537 percent in a single week. The record never cracked the UK charts but reached the Billboard 200 in 2010. Follow-up album The Glorious Dead in 2012 and subsequent releases kept them touring internationally, playing festivals like Coachella, SXSW, and Fuji Rock, though they never achieved another sync placement as massive as Borderlands 2.

In 2019, The Heavy released their fifth album Sons, which reached number 31 on the US Top Independent Albums chart. They continued creating music for the Borderlands franchise, recording “Put It On The Line” for Borderlands 3. An instrumental jazz version of the track appeared in Poker Night 2, while the virtual reality rhythm game Pistol Whip featured it in the Smoke and Thunder campaign. The song has become synonymous with flawed heroism and gritty determination, a reluctant warrior’s ballad that found its audience through video game controllers and Netflix binges rather than traditional radio rotation.

Sometimes a song finds its home in the strangest places. An airport hum, some cat litter on a studio floor, and a painful family story about youth crime in Bath became the soundtrack to millions of gamers shooting their way across a cel-shaded wasteland. The Heavy wanted people to think they’d lifted it from a movie, and plenty of fans asked which film it came from. Turns out it didn’t come from anywhere except raw experience and a guitarist willing to walk through cat litter for authenticity. That’s the kind of dedication that makes legends, even if the charts never noticed.