Let All That We Imagine Be The Light, Garbage’s expansive, explosive, all-too-human album is their eighth. It’s the first one that arrived unexpectedly, due to unforeseen circumstance. Conjured into existence when the band was all at sea.
In August 2024, Shirley Manson, the band’s lead singer and lightning rod front woman, was abruptly forced to stop performing. An old injury, sustained when she fell from a stage, at KROQ’s Weenie Roast in 2016, had flared up and it took her down. “I fell off stage and battered my hip,” she says. “All these years later, it basically shattered on me.”
She was in a bad way. An operation was needed, with time afterwards for her to get better. Garbage’s world tour for No Gods No Masters, one that had been planned to take them into 2025, screeched to a halt.
“We were catapulted into a situation out of our control,” says Shirley. “It felt at the time like a curse, but I actually think it was a gift. It gave us a brand new shift in perspective.”
The band had to change to continue. Not only Shirley, who, post-op, embarked on serious at-home rehabilitation, using exercise machines at home and a walking cane outside (“I loved the aesthetic element of that cane,” she says, “but walking was very hard”) - but Butch Vig, Duke Erikson and Steve Marker, too. Their year was completely upended. A void presented itself. They reacted in the way they know best. By making music.
As Shirley battled to regain and reclaim her body, Butch, Duke and Steve were busy in Butch’s studio, making soundscapes and atmospheres which they sent to the recovering singer. “Little sonic gifts via email every couple of days”, she calls them. Something for Shirley to hang on to in the tough months post-operation. “I’m a fierce character,” she says. “I’ve never moved through the world feeling particularly scared of anything. But during my recovery, I felt incredibly vulnerable and incredibly fragile.”
Frailty was a strange sensation for a woman who, at 58, is a full-force queen of performance and interview: charismatic and intelligent, impatient and loving, front foot and honest. The new emotion transferred into her lyrics. “There’s a sense of mortality and vulnerability in there,” she says. “I had less interest in being really forthright and more interest in trying to capture a feeling. And I did that.”
No Gods No Masters, their last album, was, she says, “a very confident, aggressive record”; also very prescient, given some of the subject matter. But this new album became strong in a different way. “When you’re able to give voice to your own fears and vulnerability, that is actually strength,” says Shirley. “It helps to ignite your survival skills, your desire for joy, and your desire for life and adventure.” She found herself thinking of others, as well as herself. “We’re all freaked out, we all have to be vigilant, every human being is hurtling towards the same fate in the end,” she says. “And our challenge is how to live a really joyful existence as best as possible in the circumstances we find ourselves. We’re here and we must move forward. Trying to mend that which has been broken.”
Such mending and moving forward are rooted in hard-won hope, a belief in togetherness. Love can be defiance in a world that seems crueller and crasser by the day. Though love, in particular, is not Shirley’s usual subject matter: “I usually leave that to others.” But, struggling to re-find herself after her injury, isolated and frustrated, she found herself taking strength not only from those she loves directly - the band, her family, her friends - but from the larger love that comes from others, from like-minded people. Their tenderness and solidarity. The album has a sense of being part of something bigger than yourself, something that veers into the magical.
(As an aside, the band refer to themselves as The Octopus - something bigger than their individual beings. “The Octopus is our group name on texts,” says Shirley. “We’re stuck together, with all our weird limbs reaching out in all different directions at different times.” Hence the cover of Let All That We Imagine Be The Light.)
The songs on Let All That We Imagine Be The Light tell stories, both musically and lyrically. Some are direct tales from Shirley’s life. Have We Met (The Void) recalls a specific moment in Barcelona where a love affair crumbled in the face of a furious woman. Chinese Fire Horse is a riposte to a ridiculous, ageist retirement inquiry from journalists. Other songs emerged less directly. A half-remembered memory; a ‘we must flee’ emotion. Sisyphus and Radical combine Shirley’s desperation about recovery with mantras (prayers) for those that are repressed.
The music is generous, full of atmosphere and drama. Filmic. You might hear a Joy Division-style bass, some no-messing riffs. There is dignity and splendour, dynamics and beauty. A sense of a full world, of story-crafting through soundscaping.
So, yes, this record is different. The circumstances may have forced the band out of their preferred way of working, but, as Shirley says, the broken-ness became their inspiration.
“As an artist,” she says, “I don’t want to do the same record over and over again. I want to explore. What does it mean to be a human being on this earth? We’ve not been in these societal circumstances before. I’ve never been 58 before. The matrix that we live within is designed to make us all feel disempowered by ageing, and yet it’s such a thrilling part of our existence. It’s interesting, and in the lineage of pop music, much of that stuff is not yet explored. It remains a mystery.”
Sometimes her injuries felt catastrophic, as she worked her way through to health. This chimed with the world outside, but also, perhaps, the catastrophe chimed, somewhere deep, with how she works. “Each record feels like our last record. That’s how I always approach it. Like, if you never, ever get to say or sing anything again, what is it that you’d like to say?”
And what is that?
“Well, this record is about what it means to be alive, and about what it means to face your imminent destruction,” she says. “It’s hopeful. It’s very tender towards what it means to be a human being. Our flaws and our failures are still beautiful, even though we’re taught that they’re not. I love being a societal elder. I’m really grateful that I’m old enough to be called one. I feel it’s me and my generation’s duty to ignite hope. This is a tender, thrilling record about the fragility of life. ”
