Garbage knows when it’s time to take out the trash.
For more than three decades, the quartet of singer Shirley Manson, drummer Butch Vig and Duke Erikson and Steve Marker on both guitars and keys have been forging their own path and distinctive electronic rock sound while cultivating a dedicated global fan base. Emerging as part of the alt-rock ’90s, their music was abrasive but melodic, full of struggle and grit so singularly expressed with a dark gravity by a force of nature vocalist and lyricist.
Full of attitude and ambition, Steve Marker, Butch Vig, Shirley Manson and Duke Erikson have been carving their own niche since 1993: Photo by Joseph CulticeUnlike most rubbish, the band is not being indiscriminately discarded; Garbage is not used up. The band’s eighth studio album, 2025’s “Let All That We Imagine Be The Light,” has been hailed by critics and fans alike. But, just as they’ve always done, the four are charting their own course on their own terms.
The reality is: “Nothing stays the same forever. Everything must change. All beautiful things come to an end.” The band shared this message on Instagram in August in a post that also revealed that the current string of live dates is “our last North American headline tour…. If the truth be told, it is unlikely we will play many of the cities on this tour ever again.”
It’s not because Garbage is done, with nothing left to say—it’s just the opposite: There’s plenty more to say, and “Let All That We Imagine Be The Light” shows it, bursting with deliberate optimism.
Getting old is unavoidable, though. And nothing says over the hill than a total hip replacement, which Manson had done in 2023 due to a lingering injury sustained falling off a stage in 2016. Then in 2024, her other hip broke and she needed a second surgery. Just shy of 60, Manson is the youngest member of the band. (Born in 1966, the rest of the guys all entered this world in the ’50s.) Aging’s a bitch, so Garbage is embracing it.
“When I was young, I tended towards the destruction of things,” Manson says. Straddling a hard rock-electronica razor blade, this rage is all over Garbage’s first several releases. “Now that I’m older I believe it’s vitally important to build and to create things instead. I still entertain very old romantic ideals about community, society and the world. I don’t want to walk through the world creating havoc, damaging the land and people. I want to do good.”
While Vig, Erikson and Marker originally got together in the drummer’s home studio, which he calls Grunge Is Dead (ICYMI, Vig produced the most legendary grunge record of all time: Nirvana’s “Nevermind”), in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood to work on new material, “she was out of commission at the start of this year and ended up doing a lot of the vocals sitting in her bed with a handheld microphone,” Vig says of Manson’s initial contributions.
This made for a disjointed recording process. “It was hard because we would write music, and she wasn’t here,” he tells. They’d send her rough mixes of the concepts they were creating—what Manson calls “little sonic gifts”—and she’d return some vocal ideas. The guys “were blown away by what she was writing. We just loved the lyrics, and I feel like there’s a real intimacy to her vocals on this record, and a rawness,” Vig describes. If she’d been in the studio with them, “the record would have been different sounding.”
“There’s an intimacy in it that we captured because she was in a pretty rough spot, and just on her own, isolated, doing these vocals,” he continues.
"If the truth be told, it is unlikely we will play many of the cities on this tour ever again,” the band wrote on Instagram in August: Photo by Joseph CulticeConcurrently dealing with an extremely difficult rehab while seeking inspiration for a new record is no small task. On one hand, being separated from your longtime bandmates during such a fragile and vulnerable time is lonely, but it also provided Manson with space to be truly uninhibited with her thoughts.
On the symphonic, religiously emotive album closer “The Day That I Met God,” Manson namechecks her opioid pain meds, repeating: “Tramadol, Tramadol, I found God in Tramadol.” The song’s lyrics came to her, naturally, when she was “absolutely out [of] my mind on painkillers” walking on a treadmill, “trying to get my body stronger,” she says. Her husband immediately set up a mic in the bedroom. “I was still in my pajamas, and I sat down, and I recorded the vocal from start to finish. This complete story came out of me. My husband was laughing at me at the time, going, ‘Where did that come from?’ I don’t even know.
“It was one of these times when you just open your mouth and something comes out that you have no control over. It’s just as is.”
“That’ll get rid of any inhibitions, man,” Vig jokes. “If you’re taking Tramadol, you let it all hang out.”
“Shirl was adamant that she wanted there to be some light on the record,” Vig explains. The album’s name clearly reflects this as does, paradoxically, the opening track: “There’s No Future In Optimism.”
“I love the [song’s] title,” Manson says. “The band sent it to me and I was like, ‘This is fucking great. I’m keeping that.’ But the lyrics are an action against that title. Because if we allow our fatalism or our negativity to really take over, we will crumble.”
“The song is exactly the opposite of that [title],” Vig adds. “The world is so crazy right now. You look at the news every day, and it can just be overwhelming,” he continues. “So while there is a lot of darkness in the lyrics, we wanted people to find some hope and positivity in the lyrics, and maybe something will resonate with them and then help them get through another day.”
“When we were writing the songs on this record, we wanted there to be some weight that we believe in,” Vig says. “Especially Shirley, she doesn’t want to sing a song unless she believes in what she’s singing.”
“She’s really the mouthpiece for the band,” Vig shares. “That’s one of the reasons we’re still together after 30 years, because we do share a lot of sensibilities that we have in common…. It’s the music that we grew up listening to: a lot of punk and new wave and Patti Smith and Chrissie Hynde and Blondie and Siouxsie Sioux, you know. These are a lot of icons that we loved and were very influential on Sherl when she was starting to sing.”
Garbage set itself apart from the ’90s alt-rock mainstream by “mixing pop hooks with fuzzy guitars, with electronica and hip-hop beats,” Vig details of that first self-titled record released in 1995. “There’s a lot of stuff musically going on, but Shirley was the glue because she has such a strong presence that allowed us to do that; we could veer all over the place because her voice had this gravity to it and held the music together.”
Released on May 30, 2025, a psychedelic octopus graces the album art for "Let All That We Imagine Be The Light"—the perfect metaphor for Garbage's eighth studio album. Listen to the entire record below.The group has maintained this “strong sonic identity,” as Vig puts it, over the years. There’s no way for “Let All That We Imagine Be The Light” to not sound like Garbage—“it’s in our DNA,” Vig sums up—thanks to Manson sharply elbowing her way around a music industry (and world) run by men. Never one to mince words, her driving lyrics continue to fight the patriarchy (“Chinese Fire Horse,” “Get Out My Face AKA Bad Kitty” and “R U Happy Now” with the line: “Make no mistake, friend, they hate your women / They rob your children and they love their guns”) and detail struggles with love (on the true stories in “Have We Met (The Void)” and “Love To Give”), confidence (on the desperate, industrial-leaning “Hold”) and her physical (“Sisyphus”) and mental (“Radical”) recovery. Some of these lyrics also reflect the times: International conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Congo, Sudan and Haiti also weighed heavily on Manson and the band.
Going back to the beginning, Garbage has always bucked trends, but 1998’s “Version 2.0” carved its own lane of futuristic guitar rock. Repeatedly welcoming musical twists and turns, today’s sound can be a bit smoother around the edges but no less intense. Finding the balance between yin and yang, darkness and light, there’s a maturity and more room to breathe versus the furious, thrumming energy heard on the band’s earlier releases. This was intentional:
“We’ve tried on this record to keep it from getting too dense,” Vig says. “There are some very dense-sounding songs and moments on the record, but there are also some moments where there’s a lot of space. We wanted… to leave some room for Sherl’s vocal.”
A psychedelic octopus graces the album’s cover, and “it was the working title” for a while, Vig reveals. With a main control center in the middle but eight tentacles off doing seemingly independent tasks, “That’s Garbage,” Vig says. “We function as a unit, but we’re all very opinionated, and sometimes moving in different directions.”
“We’re lucky that somehow the octopus is able to rationally think through and make decisions,” he chuckles. “So we end up kind of working as one. Garbage is built from the four of us—these unique entities—but it does function as one solid unit.”
Shirley Manson and Garbage live at RV Inn Style Resorts Amphitheater on June 3, 2023—click here to see more photos by John AlcalaAt the end of the day, Garbage gives more fucks today than they did in 1995. “I feel it’s me and my generation’s duty to ignite hope,” Manson says. “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?”
“We definitely wanted the record to… convey the feeling that people have the power,” Vig continues. “We don’t know how long we’re going to be around. We’ve been together 30 years; this could be our last record. We hope it’s not, but there’s no way to know…. There’s no guarantees so you want to make everything count.”
