Despite a vital new album, this could be the last time fans can see Garbage
For more than three decades, the quartet of singer Shirley Manson, drummer Butch Vig and Duke Erikson and Steve Marker on both guitars and keyboards have forged their own path and distinctive electronic rock sound. Emerging as part of the 1990s alt-rock scene, Garbage played music that was abrasive but melodic, full of struggle and grit so singularly expressed with a dark gravity by a force-of-nature vocalist and lyricist.
So many years later, Garbage is not ready to be discarded. 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, Vig indicated in an interview. And “Let All That We Imagine Be the Light” shows it, bursting with deliberate optimism.
But getting old is unavoidable. Manson had a total hip replacement in 2023 because of 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. (The guys all entered the world in the 1950s.) Aging is tough stuff, so Garbage is embracing it.
“When I was young, I tended towards the destruction of things,” Manson wrote in artist notes that accompanied the new album. 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.”
While Vig, Erikson and Marker originally got together in the drummer’s home studio in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood to work on new material, Manson “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 said of the singer’s initial contributions.
The fellows would send Manson 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,” Vig described, noting 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 explained.
Being separated from your longtime bandmates during such a fragile and vulnerable time is lonely, yet it also provided Manson with space to be uninhibited with her thoughts.
On the symphonic, religiously emotive album closer “The Day That I Met God,” Manson name-checks 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 build back her strength. Her husband immediately set up a microphone in the bedroom. “I was still in my pajamas, and I sat down, and I recorded the vocal from start to finish,” Manson said in the notes for the new album.
“Shirl was adamant that she wanted there to be some light on the record,” Vig said. 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 said in the notes. “The band sent it to me and I was like, ‘This is 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.”
At the end of the day, Garbage cares more today than they did in 1995. “I feel it’s me and my generation’s duty to ignite hope,” Manson said. “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?”
Added Vig: “We definitely wanted the record to … convey the feeling that people have the power. 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 are no guarantees so you want to make everything count.”
CONCERT PREVIEW
Garbage
8 p.m. Monday With Starcrawler. $89.44-$200.34. The Eastern, 777 Memorial Drive SE, Atlanta. ticketmaster.com.
