Ask Shirley Manson about God and she’ll tell you the guy shows up all over No Gods No Masters because she’s sick of watching religion weaponized to punish. “I don’t really see much practice of true religious philosophy,” she says. “I see hypocrisy and cruelty. I was a devout kid. My father was my Sunday school teacher. That stays with you. But if you’re a true believer, you won’t be offended by this record.”
The album, released in 2021, landed like a firebomb—post-Trump, post-protest, post-patience. “I knew in the first two weeks it was going to be a different kind of record,” Manson says. “What came out of my mouth was different. These are sensitive times, but it was also time to be bold. I couldn’t hold back.”
On Wolves, the band’s lead single, Manson sounds like she’s in a knife fight—with God, with herself, maybe with both. She laughs when asked if that’s accurate. “It’s mostly the battle with self. We’re all made up of different facets—some good, some less impressive. You’re just trying not to resort to the worst version of yourself. And I often do.” The inspiration came from an Eastern European folktale about a boy wrestling the wolves inside him. Biblical, folkloric, deeply human—classic Garbage territory.
She has long lived as an outsider, something the album leans into. “I’m the only woman in the band, I’m Scottish living in America, I’m always the odd one out. I’ve accepted that status. And actually, it’s been phenomenal for Garbage. We don’t sound like anyone else. We’ve never been part of a scene. That’s priceless.”
If the record feels more post-punk than Garbage has ever sounded, that’s because it is. Blame Butch Vig’s new drum machine. “He didn’t know how to use it,” Manson says. “The rhythm tracks were naive, deliberately, respectfully naive. It pushed us toward the records we grew up with—Gary Numan, Roxy Music, Siouxsie, The Cure. We got back to a beginner’s mindset. That’s vital when you’ve been a band 25 years. Otherwise you just become background music.”
Manson is under no illusions about the industry Garbage still has to navigate. “The music industry is a hellhole,” she says flatly. “Its whole purpose is to exploit the artist. That’s how they make money. And that will never change. There’s no middle class anymore. It’s the upper class—Beyoncé, Rihanna, Bieber—or nothing. Everyone else is working two or three jobs and trying to tour. That’s reality.”
She’s equally blunt on gender politics. The MeToo movement, she says, has been treated as a “female issue” when it’s very clearly a male one. “This is a mess you made. And yet so few men have entered the conversation empathetically. That surprises me. One in three women and one in seven men experience aggression. It’s extraordinary, and it demands our attention.” She champions festival equality, women of color in music, positive discrimination—“otherwise representation will remain as it is.”
For all the righteous fury, there’s also evolution in her optimism. “I lay my hopes at the feet of evolution. Young people aren’t going to put up with the same rubbish we did. They’re aware, they’re concerned about the environment, about representation. They won’t accept the old order. We need those marginalized voices. We’re stupid not to take the best ideas and move forward.”
Her own survival, she admits, is thanks to writing. “It calmed me down. It let me register my fury for the public record. That’s substantial. That’s relieving. And my band met me on that intense plane with no pushback. That surprised me.”
Looking back at Beautiful Garbage turning 20, Manson points to tracks like “Androgyny” and “Queer” as proof that progress—however slow—has been real. “It gladdens me to see the slow shifts,” she says. “I just hope we can continue down this path of acceptance.”
As for Garbage’s continued existence, she’s grateful. “We’ve been called a 90s band forever. But we’re still here, still saying something. That feels like a miracle.”
Or, as she puts it more simply: “Music unifies. When life gets tough, we run to our music. That’s how we survive.”
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
