Garbage’s Shirley Manson: “I don’t have to be young, I don’t have to be sexy – if you cancel me, you cancel me”

Garbage icon Shirley Manson has spoken to NME about using “hope as an act of resistance” on the band’s new album, as well as the situation in Palestine, overcoming the lowest point of her life, aging proudly, and fighting back against sexist tabloids.

The alt-rock veterans’ eighth album ‘Let All That We Imagine Be The Light‘ was released on Friday (May 30) and given a full five-star review by NME, who concluded that: “While the world can often feel like a dark place, there is a sense of empowerment that can be reached by letting in the light.

“Over three decades after they formed, we are now seeing the band like never before. Not only are they showcasing some of their most intriguing and impactful material, but they’re also paving the way into a hopeful new chapter.”

Manson caught up with NME while in London, taking a brief break from the “fascist regime” of the US where she lives in LA with her husband and band collaborator, Billy Bush.

“It’s been heavenly to get out of the madness for a minute,” Manson told NME. “With certainty, I can say that things are going to get worse,” she continued, turning to US politics and world events. “That’s what’s so terrifying. They’re just getting started. It’s very, very serious and I’m not sure that everyone quite fully grasps just how mental this has got, and how it will continue to get more mental.”

Manson explained how it was this aversion to the ‘doom spiral’ that shaped the character of the band’s new record. “I will literally go mad if I don’t try and employ some kind of belief in humankind’s ability to turn the boat around,” she said. “Although every single day I get up and open my phone and it looks more and more desperate, chaotic and insane. It doesn’t seem to be improving.

“But when we wrote this album last year, I was fully invested in my hope as a form of resistance and disobedience.”

Check out our full interview with Manson below, where she tells us about hope over hate, the Kneecap controversy, solidarity with Palestine, and feeling more herself now at 58 admitting: “I was dead when I was young.”

NME: Hello Shirley. There’s a lot of love on the new album, particularly on the song ‘Hold’. What made you turn towards that?

Shirley Manson: “I’ve never really written about love very much. I always think it’s been written about by people a thousand more talented than me. I’m just not a romantic person, really. After my mum died and then Veela [Manson’s ‘soul dog’], I realised I had to touch love somewhere, somehow. I’ve got an amazing marriage and I love my husband so much, but I also realised that in order to move on through a different passage in my life I had to reach out to find all the different types of love: the world, nature, the ocean, friends, my bandmates, my family.

“I want to ignite that love. Like a torch when the world feels dark, I need to find all the hands that I can hold. My go-to is usually indignance, so I realised I had to come at things from a different perspective this time around or I would drown in my own negativity.”

Perspective is important, especially at a time like this…

“I was in Egypt at the beginning of this year – now there’s a civilisation that’s been oppressed, destroyed, occupied over and over again by almost everybody. And yet, there she was in full glory, beauty and recovery. It really did give me a kick up the arse and reignited my hope a little.”

You’ve been very vocal about the Israel and Palestine situation. What was the discourse around that in Egypt?

“It was very interesting. They were basically saying that they were terrified that Israel would occupy the Sinai. I was asking them, ‘What’s happening? Why are you not helping these [Palestinian] people?’ They said, ‘We have a million-strong army to defend ourselves’ and it was presented to me that the Egyptians never want to be the aggressor against anyone. They don’t want to be involved in war, which seems sensible to me. They said, ‘This is incredibly painful to watch from afar, but we don’t want our young people bombed, maimed and starved’.

“It was so unbelievably distressing, but I’m very grateful to you for bringing the subject up. I’ve done two weeks of press and only one journalist has directly asked me about Gaza.”

And at a time where there’s a debate around the place of freedom of expression in music…

“Exactly. It’s peculiar. I just want to urge people to read and educate themselves before they point fingers at young bands for speaking up and trying to stop the slaughter of young children and babies in their tents. Please just do yourself a favour and read a book about that part of the world.

“Once you educate yourself, you start to see things much more clearly and fairly – but there seems to be no interest in anyone wanting to learn about Palestinian people. There’s a peculiar desire to erase them entirely because they’re so inconvenient. It’s like we’re talking about a whole race of people that have been scraped off Western shoes.”

Garbage, 2025. Credit Joseph Cultice

And it’s a conversation that can be had with nuance?

“There’s a great sensitivity towards Israel, and rightly so. The suffering that European Jews endured during World War Two has a sensitivity to it – especially in the UK where it’s been ingrained in us to fight against Anti-Semitism, which we absolutely should. But please just read a history book and try to understand what’s happening here. I’m aghast by how there’s no one advocating for the Palestinians and we’re not supposed to say a word in their defence. It feels like madness to me, a deliberate and chosen blindness.

“I wake up each morning in vast amounts of distress, as do many musicians and we’re all getting punished for it.”

How are you processing the backlash?

“I find it perplexing. I understand that’s just a tactic to shut people up. They’re aware that artists have bigger platforms – in some cases massive platforms – and they don’t want them to use their platform in any way that doesn’t serve their agenda. It’s just so silly and I don’t even listen to it. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion. If you’re not physically hurting anyone, you’re entitled to express it.

“What everyone is begging for is for the slaughter to stop and I don’t see how anyone could argue against that, but they accuse us of being terrorist supporters. None of us are. Did Kneecap [with one member currently facing a terror charge] exercise the best judgement in their choice of words? I see why some people freaked out, but we all know deep down that they’re decent young artists trying to affect change in some way and get us all to at least recognise that these people exist.

“While I sympathise with the fear and the historical suffering, the ancestral pain, I still don’t understand how anyone can see what’s going on in Gaza and not be crying out for it to stop. I just don’t understand it. There’s not a lot I can do, unfortunately.”

Garbage, 2025. Credit Joseph Cultice

You’ve been through a lot with having two hips replaced, losing loved ones, facing the rise of the right in the US and a lot of the causes you believe in facing a battering…

“I’d be damned if they crushed me. It’s basically that: just defiance. That last record [‘No Gods No Masters’, 2021] was full of outrage and I did see where it was going. I got laughed at by a lot of journalists who made some outrageously condescending comments in their reviews of that record. Well here are, bitches! I was fucking right. I didn’t want to be right, but I nailed it.

“The day after we played Wembley Arena [in 2024], I was wheeled through Heathrow in a wheelchair. I was totally broken. I got a labral tear on top of a fucked hip and a cyst developed, so I was bed-bound for three months. All I could think was, ‘You’ve really fucked yourself this time’. I thought I would never get into the thrust of my life again. I was thinking a lot about my death and what I was going to do if I couldn’t get my body back in shape, how much my career relies on my body. I felt frightened, fragile and vulnerable. I felt shame and embarrassment, which was really twisted.

“I had a lot of physical problems, and losing my dog was devastating. I sound pathetic, but when Veela died I wanted to die with her. All the joy and loveliness of my life felt like it was gone. Going through grief, you start to put your life together, you recover, you realise, ‘Well, I’m really glad I didn’t die with my dog!’ When you have to deploy discipline and physical exertion into recovery, that is uplifting. Seeing your body recover is uplifting. It continues to be uplifting that I grow stronger every day.

“Weirdly enough, by the crisis of complete physical collapse and having to learn to walk again twice in two years was invigorating. It felt like the worst thing that had ever happened to me in many ways, but it turned into a positive. I kept saying to Billy [Bush, husband], ‘I’m not happy’. I never say that. Of course the forces of the world weren’t helping either. I was really low, and then bit by bit, centimetre by centimetre, I recovered my equilibrium.”

READ MORE: Garbage – “If you’re as successful as we were in the ‘90s, that is a burden”

You previously told us that ‘No Gods No Masters’ felt like a “rebirth”. Where does a band go after that?

“In a funny way, I don’t know where we found our vigour from. We barely communicate, we don’t really hang out. When we are together, we all love each other and it’s always good fun – but we don’t communicate about anything of any import at all.

“Even though we are ancient at this point, there is some kind of robust figure that we have but I look at Duke [Erikson, guitar]  and I see the vigour for life that he has. Our time is running out so we are going to enjoy every aspect of this. That makes it really beautiful and feel urgent. After 30 years, to feel that is a gift. As humans, we’ve been able to invest in a lot of gratitude.”

Garbage’s Shirley Manson with Jehnny Beth after accepting the NME Icon Award in 2018. Credit: Dean Chalkley for NME

Do you feel a duty as an older female artist to show younger generations that there is a road ahead?

“I don’t feel any responsibility towards anyone, not even the rest of the band. I have a responsibility to myself. I’ve earned that. I think I’ve found my voice as an artist. That voice is outspoken and always has been. Our uniqueness lies in the fact that we’re not kids, we’re adults. We’re elders, actually. What a beautiful place to be.

“I don’t have to be young, I don’t have to be fast, I don’t have to be sexy, I don’t have to be appealing, I don’t have to smile. If you cancel me, you cancel me. I’ve had a fucking great career. I really don’t fucking care. If you cancel us, I’ll feel guilty that I’ve messed shit up for my band, but I’d much rather be true to who I am as a human being, how I was raised by a family I’m very proud of.

“I want to talk about the things that I see taking place in the world around me. I don’t want to pretend, I don’t want to be inauthentic, I don’t want to lie. I’m not nostalgic, I’m not looking back, I’m not looking forward, I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be in that particular moment. The more I’ve done that, the more my life has blossomed. I enjoy my life – much more than I did when I was young.”

How do you look back on your younger days?

“I really was troubled, especially in the first few years of our career. I didn’t enjoy fame. It’s uninteresting to me entirely. I don’t like celebrity culture. It’s starting to look even more obscene than it used to. I didn’t do well when the band were at the height of our mainstream cultural appeal. I’m just not the right personality. My life is exactly how I want it to be now. I feel authentic. This is what it feels like to be a nearly-60-year-old Scottish woman.”

And you’re enjoying this age?

“Being older is fantastic. That’s the thing I didn’t understand when I was young. I was always told that it was going to be horrible. Instead, I’ve found nothing but comfort. I just feel like my brain has been switched on. I was dead when I was young. I was so busy hustling, doing drugs, having sex, drinking alcohol, and being wild that I didn’t notice nature, I didn’t notice architecture. I read a lot but I wasn’t really interested in the history of literature, poetry or art. Now my brain is on fire. It feels like I’m running out of time so I need to ingest all of this. It’s exciting to me – all these ideas out there.”

A lot of people enjoyed the way in which your tore down that “weaponised” Daily Mail headline about your appearance… 

“I used to take it very personally and I’d be very annoyed, hurt and creeped out. Now I realise that whoever wrote that headline, that’s their fear that they’re putting out there for the world to see.

“I think it says more about our culture than it does about me. I chose to respond to it, first of all because we’ve got a song on the new record [‘Chinese Fire Horse’] that deals exactly with that mentality. I want young people to know that this fear of aging is nonsense. You’ve no idea about all of the amazing things that are going to come down the pipe for you that will compensate for the fact that maybe your skin isn’t quite as unlined as it once was.

“For some reason, society wants us to fold up and go away. When you get older, you can’t be pushed around in the same way that you once were. That’s why they want you to fear being old.”

And then you face them in ‘Chinese Fire Horse’ and tell them: “I’m not dead, I’m not done”…

“That was another example of me having to deal with journalists who assume I should curl up and go home because I was 52. It’s a rebuke to people who suggest women should retire at any age. It’s nobody’s business at what point anyone chooses to retire, but it’s a question that only gets asked of women.

“No one has ever asked my bandmates who are considerably older than me. I was seething, and it gave me such great joy to put it into a song. It’s not meant to be serious. In ancient Chinese culture, they used to kill the female Chinese fire horse babies because they thought they would grow up to kill their husbands. They saw them as a threat to society, so I loved that.”

How do you feel about the future now, given all you’ve learned and been through? 

“Maybe I’ll get even better at writing about love. How could I have not allowed this fire to run in parallel to the rest of my life? How could I have been so blind to it? How could I have wilfully not tuned into that force?

“I don’t know if I’ve gotten to the point where I love myself. That’s the biggest problem. I think that’s why love has been a challenge, because I’ve had a poor relationship with myself since I was a child – but I think that I’m recovering. Maybe I’ll get there in the end, I think I will. I might be really old, but that doesn’t matter.”

‘Let All That We Imagine Be The Light’ is out now, with the band touring North America throughout 2025. Visit here for tickets and more information. 

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