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May 30, 2025 Web Exclusive By Andy Von Pip Photography by Joseph Cultice

Over nearly three decades, Garbage have forged a reputation for reinvention while staying true to their distinctive sound, a bold fusion of soaring guitars, atmospheric textures, and Shirley Manson’s fiercely captivating vocals. Their latest album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, follows the critical success of 2021’s No Gods No Masters, but marks a significant departure. It’s an album that pulses with a renewed sense of hope and possibility. Beneath it all, Manson’s lyrics strike a delicate balance between vulnerability and defiance, capturing a band that remains at the peak of their creative powers.

For Manson, the journey to this album began under unexpected circumstances. After hip surgery in 2023, she faced a setback when her other hip collapsed just one day before Garbage’s 2024 show at the Ovo Arena Wembley, an event that made her “question everything.” Reflecting on the process, she explains, “It really started to come together towards the end of last year. I had just had surgery and was clawing my way back to being able-bodied. Most of the lyrics were written then, while the music came together in the summer. It all unfolded in a really weird, scrambled way, unlike any other record we’ve made, just because I couldn’t physically get into the studio.”

She continues, “I told the band to keep working and to send me the music, which they did. We’ve never really worked like that before. If you’ve ever had a major physical impairment, you know how much you have to wrangle your brain to get yourself back, in my case, literally getting back on my feet. That experience definitely influenced how I viewed the world, my place in it, my age, and the longevity of the band. There’s a lot going on.”

Manson has spoken before about her deliberate effort to move beyond the anger that defined No Gods No Masters. Yet, despite her unflinching, direct honesty, her lyrics have always been rooted in empathy, a desire to connect and make sense of the chaos around her. In 2025, with so much still to be angry about, Manson sought to find a more hopeful perspective. “I’m a strong personality, and I don’t like that about myself,” she explains. “I’ve got a real fire inside, and that can often scare people. I don’t mean to be intimidating, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that what I take as an explosion of feeling is often perceived as aggression, and it shuts people down. I don’t want to do that anymore. I have no interest in shutting anyone down. So, I’m trying to temper myself. I didn’t understand how I was coming across. I thought that by speaking plainly everyone would understand because I wasn’t mincing my words. I assumed everyone would get it.”

She adds, “With No Gods No Masters, I finally felt like I articulated my feelings really well, clear as a bell. But still, I realized that people were receiving it as pure, unadulterated aggression, which shocked me. So, I’ve been trying to approach things from a different angle, and a lot of that was forced on me by the circumstances I found myself in.”

The album opens with “There’s No Future in Optimism,” a striking title that at first glance, seems somewhat at odds with the quiet hope Manson has spoken about seeking out in recent years. But when asked about the title she laughs. “You’d have to ask the band,” she says. “I didn’t come up with it.”

Confined to her sickbed during recovery, Manson worked remotely while her band sent over instrumental demos for her to write to. “This is what’s so great about it,” she says. “The band were sending me music, and because they’re not the most communicative bunch, I’d just get an email with a track and its title. That one came through with ‘There’s No Future in Optimism’ as the subject line, and I loved it. I thought, ‘That is such a great title.’”

It immediately sparked something in her. “I took it as a statement, and I disagreed with it. We often come at things from completely opposite directions, and this was one of those moments. So, the lyrics became a kind of response to that. It gave me something to push back against.”

From that tension, the song took shape, rooted in Manson’s search for hope. “If we can’t practice some element of hope, we’re done for,” she says simply. “Whether you’re sick, struggling to pay your bills, lost someone, stuck in a relationship, grieving your dog, there are a million ways life can hurt. But hope is how we get through it.”

Let All That We Imagine Be the Light certainly feels like a response to the constant, grinding noise of modern catastrophe. Doomscrolling has become a kind of daily ritual, and it’s easy to feel flattened by one crisis after another. I ask Manson whether she’s had to unplug from the chaos, step out of the matrix, so to speak, to protect her own state of mind.

“No,” she says, flatly. “I wished I’d shut the news off but instead I was fucking raging.”

But rage, as Manson points out, eventually gave way to something more productive. “I realized that all of us, all over the world, will not be able to solve these enormous obstacles that we’re all facing right now if we don’t practice empathy, and don’t practice our love, you know? Two things which require daily practice. And daily investment in, and actually trying to understand where another person is coming from in order to be able to disarm them.”

I suggest that online platforms make that kind of empathy even harder, that they’re not built for nuance, let alone real understanding.

“Yeah,” she agrees, “although I would argue that it’s difficult to practice empathy and love all the time in your own real life, you know, whether it’s online or not. I think there’s a societal expectation of us all to know, in inverted commas, what we think, and have an opinion. And if you have an opinion, you’ve got to be right. There’s no room for error. There’s no room for failure.

“And I think we’ve set ourselves up to fail. Because nobody wants to admit, ‘Maybe I don’t know as much as I should know about this situation that I have a really strong opinion on.’ Nobody wants to back up and go, ‘You know what? Let me think about this whilst you tell me how you’re feeling.’ But instead, everyone’s just plunging their dagger in. And I think that’s a really dangerous place for us all to be.”

Manson is trying to live by the principles she advocates, recognizing that the certainties she once clung to in her younger years have gradually given way to a more fluid understanding of both herself and the world. “I mean, the older I get, I feel like I know less,” she says with a soft laugh. “When I was younger, I was very sure about everything. I mean, I know what’s right and wrong, but beyond that, I don’t really know anything.”

Her reflections on the evolving nature of identity , especially as a woman, tie into the larger themes of the album. As a female artist in a male-dominated industry, she’s long been acutely aware of the obstacles that exist. “There are so many pieces of writing, songs, and books by men,” she says. “But for women, there’s so much less, especially when it comes to aging. There are so few testimonies by women in the public forum, for all kinds of reasons, patriarchy being one of them, of course.”

Her voice picks up with genuine enthusiasm as she continues, “But what I’ve realized is that, as a female artist, not only is it rare for a woman to even have the chance to put a song out into the public forum that she’s written, but the experience of aging as a woman is even less talked about. It’s completely unexplored territory. I think it’s a glorious opportunity. How many songs has Bob Dylan written, and not once has he written about what it’s like to be an aging woman? One of the few things he hasn’t talked about, you know what I mean?” She chuckles, clearly enjoying the irony. “That’s a huge gap in our culture. And so, yeah, I find that sort of thrilling. What a glorious chance to be able to write about something that hasn’t been written about yet.”

For Manson, this evolving perspective brought an unexpected connection to the theme of love. Until now, she’d avoided writing about the subject, not out of rebellion, but because it never resonated with her, it could seem cliched and had been done to death. But the process of aging made her reconsider. “As I’ve gotten older, and I have lost more and more people in my life, and I’ve become much more aware of nature and the world I live in, I realized that love is so fucking powerful and expansive.”

“It’s so much bigger than I ever thought,” she continues. “I had such a small view of it when I was young. And now I’ve realized it’s 360-degree vision, as opposed to 90 or 180. It’s entirely different now for me.”

Clarity doesn’t always arrive in a dramatic moment or as a sudden revelation. More often, it quietly walks alongside you through moments of grief, through growing older, and the slow shift in what you start to notice. Eventually, you reach an age where a scenic view can take your breath away, and you suddenly understand what your parents meant when they used to say, “Look at that view, isn’t it lovely?”

Manson laughs. “Yeah, when we were young, it was like, ‘Yeah, okay, fuck off, Dad. I don’t give a fuck about the view.’ And now it’s like, tears spring to your eyes, ‘You know, it’s amazing.’”

While there may be more hope threaded through this record, Garbage haven’t lost any of their power or edge. Shirley Manson remains as uncompromising as ever. “Chinese Firehorse,” for example, still crackles with righteous anger, inspired by journalists asking if she had any plans to retire, something she found laughable. “Chinese Fire Horses are considered troublesome!” she says. “Traditionally, they left girls born in Fire Horse years on the mountains to die, because according to superstition, they will grow up and kill their husbands.” For Manson the Chinese Fire Horse became emblematic, a symbol of defiance.

Elsewhere, album closer “The Day That I Met God” is one of the most majestic songs the band have ever written. It sounds deeply personal, carried by the memorable lyric: “I found God in Tramadol.” For all its emotional intensity, Manson says writing it was surprisingly easy.

“I was high on painkillers, and I was also really desperate. I mean, I literally couldn’t walk, you know, so I’m trying to relearn how to walk, which is not a glamorous experience by any stretch of the imagination. I was down, and I wasn’t sure I was ever going to recover. So I was depressed and I was on my treadmill trying to do my rehab. And I was listening to one of the tracks the band had sent me, and I was like, ‘Oh, wait, I’ve got an idea for this.’ You know, sometimes you just get gifted by an idea. You don’t have to think about it too much. It’s just there. And I think maybe that’s the best chorus I’ve ever written in my life.”

Let All That We Imagine Be the Light is an album that feels like it’s reaching for deeper connections. There’s an energy that pulls you in, a sense that Manson is trying to bridge a gap.

As she explains, this drive to connect has always been central to her. “Not just as an artist, but as a human being, I’m always desperate to connect with other people. I also think that sometimes frightens people. I think they find it intimidating or off-putting because I’m not looking for superficial, surface-level interactions. We’ve got so little time on earth. I want to connect and find something meaningful between us.”

She pauses for a moment, then adds, “But I also know I’m really good at what I do. I’m really good at performing live because that’s my drive. I’m not on stage for people to look at me. I’m not on stage for people to admire me. I’m not on stage just to entertain. I’m there to connect with them. And I don’t think that’s always the case for every performer.”

Another way Manson has forged connections is through social media, where her unapologetic stance and refusal to play by industry rules have made her something of a lightning rod for younger female musicians. Given her experience and forthright approach, I ask if she feels a responsibility to those coming up behind her.

“Responsibility? I don’t know,” she muses, before answering. “To be honest, I don’t feel any responsibility to anybody other than myself. I don’t even feel any responsibility towards the rest of the band. I feel a responsibility to myself. I’ve worked hard enough to own my voice. I’ve worked hard enough to take up space in the band. I think trying to please other people puts you in a dangerous place. What matters is being authentic, and holding onto your agency in the world. And when you do that, you give others permission to do the same.”

For Manson, that sense of ownership was hard-won. Growing up in the 1970s, the idea of agency didn’t come easily. “It’s hard for men to fully grasp what it’s like for women, especially back then. It was a different century. Women were expected to make room for men, to shrink themselves in shared spaces. That expectation was rarely, if ever, put on men.”

Her tone shifts, growing more reflective. “These are big themes. And they’re complicated to talk about. But women of my generation were taught not to take up space. Literally. Don’t speak too loudly. Don’t expect attention. Smile. Be pleasing.”

There’s a brief pause before she continues, with a laugh. “And of course, I didn’t do any of that. I shirked it. For some reason, I’m not even sure why, I just didn’t go along with it. I was disobedient. Maybe that’s why I connect with younger women. They see that and think, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to be obedient either. Fuck that.’”

Over the years, Manson has spoken her mind with eloquence, compassion, and conviction. She sees patriarchy not just as a constraint on women, but as a burden placed on everyone. “All this ‘be a man and don’t cry and be tough,’ it’s as damaging to the male psyche as it is to women. I think there’s so much laid on the shoulders of young men too. It’s not good for any of us. So we all need to figure it out, but we need to figure it out together.”

As our time draws to a close, I ask if she still believes music has the power it once did to challenge culture and reveal uncomfortable truths.

“Well, look at what’s happening with Kneecap right now,” she shoots back. “That band is right at the center of culture at the moment. So do I think music can still shake things up? Absolutely. One hundred per cent. Not every artist has the ability to do it on that level, and not every artist is here to play that role. Everyone’s got a different purpose. Different kinds of musicians and different kinds of music, each one fills a space in society in their own way.

“Music will always have the power to touch another person deeply, without anyone else ever knowing what’s taken place. It’s so private. And in that privacy lies its power, the ability to reach the deepest part of a person. That’s what makes it so extraordinary. Even pop music, the really glossy stuff, speaks to people in ways the rest of us might never understand.

“So yeah, I still believe in music. I don’t believe in much, but I do believe in music.”

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Read our 2021 interview with Garbage’s Shirley Manson.

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