Garbage's Shirley Manson on leaning into love as an act of resistance for eighth album 'Let All That We Imagine Be The Light' • Interview • DIY Magazine

Shirley Manson had to choose hope to survive. Without it, she would’ve had to accept some grim realities. This was the juncture she was facing in the second half of 2024, after an injury to her hip - which left her unable to stand for more than five minutes - wiped Garbage’s calendar clean for the rest of the year. Consigned to bed until she could have surgery, the fog of depression began crawling into her mind.

“It was miserable, and I felt really vulnerable,” she says today, leaning back into a mint green velour armchair in a Soho hotel. “I was concerned I was never going to recover my physical vigour again because by this point, I’d been incapacitated physically for three years and it was horrid. I realised that if I didn’t get a grip, and if I didn’t tune into positive thinking, I was never going to fully recover, and I was always going to feel like I’d been victimised by the fates.”

Today, her sense of fire is back - a process aided by a second hip replacement, as well as the reconfiguration of her thought patterns. Dressed in all black with her silver hair tied back in a long ponytail, she’s every inch the vibrant punk iconoclast she always was. “My relationship to my body has shifted, obviously, after becoming fully bionic in the hips. This is going to sound really weird, but unlike a lot of people I know who feel ashamed of their implants, I think they’re fucking hot,” she declares. “I was obsessed growing up with the Bionic Woman anyway and so strangely, there’s something really thrilling about having a bionic body.”

With hindsight, she can look back and understand that this period, in a strange way, was a gift in ugly packaging: through it, she’d inadvertently found the direction for what has become Garbage’s bold new album, ‘Let All That We Imagine Be The Light’. Following the success of the raging, fire-and-brimstone sensibilities of 2021’s ‘No Gods, No Masters’, Shirley was left “stumped,” trying to envision where she wanted to go next. All she knew is that she wanted it to be different: “I get restless, and my time is running out as an artist. I want to explore different ways of expression and different approaches and subject matters.”

“I think the old world is dead and the new world is forming, and we all have to decide how we want that new world to be.”

— Shirley Manson

The answer she landed on, ultimately, was love. “My only rule was, ‘everything you do on this record has to be coming from a loving place’. Not an angry place, not an outraged place, but coming at it from my place in the world with love.” It’s an ambitious manifesto - not least for a band renowned for angst-ridden classics like ‘Only Happy When It Rains’ and ‘Stupid Girl’ - but one they convincingly deliver. Just look at opener ‘There’s No Future In Optimism’, which lyrically defies its titular sentiment over a thrumming dance-punk beat, or recent single ‘Get Out My Face AKA Bad Kitty’, which lands as a riff-driven, defiant show of strength in the face of adversity (“If you can’t join them / You’ve got to beat them”).

After all, in this day and age, we have endless reserves of anger to go around. Comment sections, column inches, culture wars, authoritarianism, climate change, human rights rollbacks – not to mention the rage-fuelled fight back against all of the above. Love is a less conventional weapon, then, but perhaps it’s even more vital. And, as Shirley points out, it’s also considerably rarer.

“I feel like love is really thin on the ground right now,” she notes. “It’s become sort of an old-fashioned word, and it’s considered cliched and corny, and it’s been written about in a million ways, and we’re all a little bored of it. But for me, it felt really vital and really necessary to bring my love into a world that I felt was destructive, chaotic, unbearably cruel, unforgiving, full of othering and intolerance.”

Crucially, while she perceived love as the antidote to hatred, she also saw it as the answer to the powerlessness it’s all so easy to fall prey to, in a time of inescapable perma-crisis. “I have no control over that as a human being,” she says simply, “I’m just one person, and I realised the only thing you can do is put love out there, your love. That’s all you can do to try and neutralise all these hideous forces that are in the world right now, which seem to be engulfing us all in despair and misery and confusion.”

And there are, Shirley acknowledges, other reasons to have hope too - not least the upswell of political music emerging from grassroots scenes across the globe. “I love all these bands who are coming out and pushing against authority, and pushing against what has been a remarkably polite couple of decades in music,” she nods.

Another glimmer of hope, she reasons, is the prospect of an impending, international social reckoning. “It’s sort of the final battle cries of [the] old, white male obsession with capitalism, you know?” she suggests. “It feels like uber-capitalism has just reached its glass ceiling and it’s unsustainable. We’re seeing these old white men rage against the [modern] world - they’re seeing their dreams be crushed and rejected - and I think it’s making them really furious, so they’re lashing out and punishing us all.

“There must be a reason for the extreme right wing to have swept across the globe, and the only reason I can really think of is capitalism and the dying embers of it. I think the old world is dead and the new world is forming, and I think we all have to decide how we want that new world to be. I do believe we can redesign the way that we live. We’re going to have to in order for us all to survive.”

‘Let All That We Imagine Be The Light’ is out now via STUNVOLUME.

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