Garbage offer love and optimism on the vital Let All That We Imagine Be the Light

They were deemed too perfect, probably a ‘fake’ record company creation. Surely it must be the vaguely anonymous guys pulling the creative strings, right? You would have hoped all that would be long behind us and yet when the promo rounds for this new album began the misogyny once again reared its ugly head in those ageist clickbait straplines. Plus ça change.

Thankfully for Garbage it’s all fuel to the fire. Shirley Manson of course has never been afraid to wear her heart on her sleeve, whether skewering racist, sexist and transphobic dinosaurs or rightly raging against warmongers wherever they carry out their atrocities, from Gaza to Ukraine to Sudan.

There’s an eternal edge with Garbage, it never really gets truly comfortable, maybe that comes in part from the never-quite-easy inter-band communication. And yet they still seem so united, a classic gang. Perhaps it’s these contradictions that make them what they are.

Manson’s health issues over the last few years have been difficult physically and emotionally, how could they not be? Female or male, when 60 looms on the horizon there are realities to face. Or fight.

In a recent characteristically open Guardian interview she summed the experience up as, “dark and depressing, and also kind of wonderful.” Antithetical emotions that we probably all know.

Garbage’s path has been a familiar one. Success ebbed and flowed, some albums were more easily lovable than others, but still there were never any duds, never a time when you felt they had lost their essential identity or integrity.

2021’s resurgent No Gods No Masters was alive with rage but for this eighth album Manson in particular had expressed a desire to balance the anger with hope and love. Yes, love, and in times like these, why the hell not?

“There’s No Future in Optimism”, a provisional title passed to Shirley and rightly retained, kicks the album into forward motion. An archetypal piece of Garbage electro-brutalism - stirring all your inner apocalyptic nightmares into a sleek and gleaming machine where guitars prowl and nimble beats skitter.

It forms a killer one-two punch with keynote track “Chinese Fire Horse”, itself a visceral f*ck you from the depths of Shirley’s soul. By way of clarity; women born in the year of the Fire Horse are allegedly in possession of a ‘bad’ personality and are considered likely to go on to kill their husbands. You can guess what year Manson was born in – hopefully for her homicide is off the table.

But Let All That We Imagine Be the Light is no one dimensional bludgeon-fest, Garbage remember to let light into the room, something that in the past, 2005’s Bleed Like Me for example, they didn’t quite pull off.

It’s all over this record, the ‘didn’t see that coming’ slide into tender melody in the storming “Hold”, the sweeping synth arpeggios that introduce “Have We Met (The Void)” or the exhilaratingly dramatic “Love to Give”. All evidence suggesting that Butch, Duke and Steve must by now have established a telepathic musical connection.

Battered, bloodied but absolutely unbowed and, as Manson has stated, “never going back into that hole they crawled out of,” Let All That We Imagine sees Garbage deal in fiery defiance but with a determinedly compassionate heart. The message? From vulnerability comes strength.

The ‘manifesto’ is laid out in the ultra-urgent “Get Out of My Face (Bad Kitty)”, “If you can’t join ‘em you gotta beat ‘em / You loathe sweetness and you call it weakness." Garbage grasps the fact that existence in such a complex world can actually be reduced to a simple choice between loving and hating. Here is your soundtrack to that world, perhaps unsurprisingly it rocks righteously. Let’s hope they’re right and there is a future in optimism.