Garbage - Pop anthems, between rage and cosmetics

Garbage is the project of three studio wizards: Steve Marker, Duke Erikson and (above all) Butch Vig, already producer of one of the most successful albums of the Nineties: Nevermind by Nirvana. But it's thanks to the sensual voice and stage presence of Scottish "riot girl" Shirley Manson (ex-Goodbye Mr Mackenzie and Angelfish) that Garbage managed to establish themselves with the alternative rock audience as one of the freshest and most captivating bands of recent years. Recruited after being spotted on MTV for an Angelfish video ("Suffocate Me"), Shirley took the first flight to the United States and joined the three producers in Madison, Wisconsin, where the band's musical adventure began.

"Garbage," meaning "trash," is a name that couldn't help but have curious origins. Two, to be precise: the rearrangement sessions "in which, a bit like in trash, you find all sorts of things," and a remark made by a supervisor overseeing the finishing touches on Butch & co.'s compositions, who, listening to a song they remixed for Nine Inch Nails, said: "It seems like garbage."

But the vulgarity of the name actually serves to mask the sophistication of their musical output. Garbage's songs are little pop symphonies, drawing on the repertoire of new wave, dance and (in part) glam-rock. They are sophisticated arrangements, the result of intense studio work on keyboards and sampling. All topped off with Manson's sensual vocals, which echo the aggression of Patti Smith, the feminist defiance of Chrissie Hynde (Pretenders) and the adolescent brashness of Courtney Love (Hole).

These are the ingredients of Garbage, their 1995 debut album, which immediately won over both audiences (over three million copies sold) and critics, with its murky ballads and its instant-knockout hits: "Only Happy When It Rains," with a catchy chorus that leaves no escape, "Stupid Girl," with echoes of Blondie-style disco, "Milk," an intense and velvety ballad, "Queer," a trip-hop number with murky atmospheres, "Vow," a carousel of disparate sound effects. Born out of recording and remixing sessions at Vig's Smart Studios, where, besides Nirvana, artists of the caliber of Depeche Mode, U2, Killdozer and many others also worked, Garbage is a collage of synthetic sounds, a cascade of textures and arrangements, a continuous sequence of rhythm shifts between rock, pop, techno and trip-hop, blending perfectly with Shirley Manson's languid vocals and aggressive lyrics.

The Edinburgh-born singer has by now become an icon of female rock. But don't dare bring up "girl power" in front of her: "It's the stupidest slogan ever conceived, it undoes decades of feminist struggle," she protests. Slight build, pale skin and even features, Shirley Manson has also become a sex symbol. She claims to turn down dozens of offers every week to bare it all for some magazine, Playboy and Penthouse chief among them. "And yet I've never felt particularly attractive, if anything the opposite — I didn't like myself and I still don't," she maintains. "But any woman in any band gets a certain kind of attention. Tina Turner, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry were singing when I was a kid. I can't take something like that seriously, I'd rather put up a sort of shield against that and everything else people say about me." And indeed, among those things are some shameless insults: "A newspaper once wrote that I'm a former drug-addicted prostitute, how nice!" the Scottish singer recently recalled. She has revealed that as a girl she was a fan of Siouxsie and The Banshees, but that it was Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders who truly set her on the path to rock: "Actually, I didn't want to be a musician. I found piano and violin lessons unbearable. But I remember the first one who really struck me was Chrissie. I still remember the first time I saw her on Top of the Pops, singing, playing guitar and leading a band, and she was someone I could actually be, someone a woman could be, not a star."

The tribute is completed on Garbage's second album, Version 2.0, which features a line taken from the Pretenders' "Talk Of The Town" (in the track "Special"). The record confirms the effectiveness of their whirlwind of sounds, with the sickly ballad "I Think I'm Paranoid" (which became the music for a well-known watch commercial), the explosive melody of "Push It," the disco pulse of "Dumb," the funk-soul of "You Look So Fine." It's a repertoire balanced between the classic rock 'n' roll of the Pretenders, the aggressive grunge of Nirvana, the trip-hop of Portishead and Massive Attack, and the dance rhythms of Madonna and Blondie. The effect is seductive, even if it perhaps lacks the melodic freshness of the choruses on the debut album. The songs are packed with velvety sounds, audiophile-pleasing references, FM radio clichés. Manson herself admits it: "We borrowed, and in some cases openly stole, from every area of music and every era. The '80s, '70s, '60s and '90s: pop, techno, drum 'n' bass, rock. I especially love all pop music, starting with the Beach Boys."

Such a sophisticated recording process doesn't easily translate into a live rendition: "How do we do it live? Simple, we cheat..." the Scottish singer explains. "Butch and the others keep the samplers right next to the traditional instruments. Even if we can't reproduce everything down to the letter, what matters is that the essence of the songs is respected. Okay, we do a lot of musical 'cut and paste,' but I guarantee we're a real band." So says Shirley, who also plays guitar in the group. The red-haired Garbage vocalist says she mostly listens to "Bjork, PJ Harvey, Fiona Apple and Tori Amos." She married Scottish sculptor Edward Farrell. And she showcased all her sensuality on the aching ballad "The World Is Not Enough," the theme song of the James Bond film of the same name. But recent times have also been particularly hard for Shirley. A nervous breakdown led her to spend a year in psychiatric therapy: "At the end of the last tour I was a wreck, and if I hadn't found help I would have gone mad," she revealed.

2001 saw the return of Garbage with a new album, Beautifulgarbage, once again marked by a sparkling electronic pop-rock sound, an ever more obvious descendant of Blondie's disco-punk. There's no shortage of "sensual" ballads, from "Til The Day I Die" to "Cup Of Coffee," from "Drive You Home" (perhaps the best) to "Nobody Loves You" (which echoes, and not only lyrically, Portishead's "Sour Times"). But despite the usual care put into the arrangements, one gets the impression that Garbage have lost much of the arsenal of irresistible choruses they flaunted on previous records. The wild charm of "Only Happy When It Rains" resurfaces, in flashes, in the bittersweet "Silence Is Golden," in the atmospheric dance of "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)" or in the catchy single "Androgyny," a title with an obvious sexual connotation, which the singer explains like this: "Everyone has a feminine side and a masculine side. One prevails, but the other isn't erased. Boys and girls together... an ideal situation." And speaking of "Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)," Shirley is keen to point out a curious detail: "It's the first song where a tuba appears. After all, I lost my virginity to a tuba player..." If she says so...

Ten years after their blazing debut, Garbage returned to the studio to release Bleed Like Me (2005), once again bearing the meticulous production stamp of Butch Vig. The album marks a return to the band's rock roots, without giving up the catchy refrains that have always characterized their output. The shameless lead single "Why Do You Love Me" hits the mark, as does the cutting riff of "Bad Boyfriend" and the darker "Run Baby Run." There's no shortage of the usual aching ballads either, which this time take the form (in part) of the title track and of the acoustic-guitar-and-piano number "It's All Over But Crying," while "Metal Heart" combines an industrial pulse with smooth neo-romantic strings. The dark "Happy Home" offers an evocative farewell, with its interplay of feedback and violins. Not a return to past glories, but certainly a reversal of the downward trend after the misstep of the previous record, Bleed Like Me at least manages to keep attention alive on a band that risked fading away completely.

Absolute Garbage (2007) is an anthology collecting seventeen of their most celebrated tracks plus the unmemorable single "Tell Me Where It Hurts," probably dating back to the sessions of the previous album. Garbage, however, don't seem interested in promoting it and go on standby, hinting that their story might have reached its end.

Six years after Bleed Like Me, however, Butch Vig was suddenly being talked about again like he hadn't been in a long time, first thanks to the acclaimed and award-laden "Wasting Lights" by Foo Fighters, and then for the twentieth anniversary of "Nevermind," the album his name will forever remain tied to. There was no better moment, in short, to dust off his multimillion-selling recording outfit. Shirley Manson can hardly believe it; despite having always been one of the most charismatic rock stars of the last two decades, her solo career struggles not only to take off but literally to get started. The album she had been working on in recent years, alongside artists like Paul Buchanan and Rivers Cuomo, didn't go down well at all with Geffen, who rejected it, branding it too dark and not radio-friendly enough.

Tired of major-label meddling, Garbage decide to go it entirely alone, even founding their own record label (STUNVOLUME) to make their fifth album. Yet their greater artistic independence doesn't push them toward experimentation or a rejection of their signature sound: as the first single "Blood For Puppies" suggests (a reggae-tinged strut with distorted guitars framing a killer chorus), the four of them still refuse to give up the natural immediacy that has always defined them.

Not Your Kind Of People (2012) sounds almost like a summation of everything Garbage have represented across their successful decade of activity (from their indie-rock beginnings to their glossiest pop), and it steps back a little from the raw, spartan rock that marked the previous Bleed Like Me – the only trace of it left is in the driving "Man On A Wire", which would have been one of the best tracks on that album. The new songs' arrangements are, in fact, once again extremely polished and layered, with a strong resurgence of electronics lending the band's sound greater three-dimensionality and distortion: at times the four get a little carried away, as in the pulsing opener "Automatic Systematic Habit", which borders on electro-dance, and in the gaudy, Balkan-tinged synth that "I Hate Love" is built around, which wouldn't have sounded out of place on a recent Lady Gaga record. They recover well, though, with the onslaught of "Battle In Me", aggressive and jagged with roaring electronic breaks, and with the entrancing trip-pop of "Sugar", in which the red-haired Scot goes back to flirting with listeners as she did in the days of "Queer".

It's the only truly successful mellow moment on the album, because the curious title track, a lysergic slow-burner with spy-movie shades that gradually morphs into a choral, '60s-style ballad, struggles to take flight despite its length, and even the closing "Beloved Freak", more conventionally romantic and arpeggiated, never rises above mere pleasantness. Still, in a game of highs and lows that seems to be the new album's unintentional leitmotif, one finds oneself pricking up one's ears at the punch of tracks like "Big Bright World", "Felt" and the excellent, blues-smeared "Control", songs that are anything but easy crowd-pleasers and in which Garbage finally rediscover that energy steeped in adolescent melancholy that defined their most memorable moments.

Now in their fifties (or nearly, in Shirley Manson's case), Garbage manage to be themselves without sounding pretentiously self-celebratory, coming across as honest even in their less successful moments.

Four years later, the band returns with Strange Littel Birds, again through their own label Stunvolume, but in partnership with Pias. For this new effort, the four claim to have "followed instinct without anchoring themselves to the past", while also admitting that the record is "the closest thing to our debut album". Put to the test of actual listening, the first half of that statement may well be true, but the second doesn't seem to hold up. All eleven of these songs, in fact, pick up on what the band did on their first two albums. The same fluid yet simultaneously dirty and acidic sound, the same urge to blend guitars and keyboards together, the same vocal timbre that's mostly jagged and anguished but every now and then softens and brightens, the same lyrics recounting unease and despair almost as if wanting to flaunt a certain sense of belonging to these emotional territories. The first single "Empty" offers an arrangement dynamic reminiscent of "I Think I'm Paranoid"; "Blackout" is restrained in the verse before the adrenaline rises in the chorus, somewhat like "My Lover's Box"; the velvety rhythm of "If I Lost You" can't help but recall that of "Queer"; on "Even Though Our Love Is Doomed", a clean sonic surface conceals tension and an epic sweep within, much as happens on "Milk"; "Magnetized" and "We Never Tell" revive the band's poppier side, the one heard on "When I Grow Up" or "Special". It wouldn't be fair, however, to dismiss these songs as mere carbon copies. The similarities noted above don't mean the new tracks are identical to their reference points, but simply that those earlier songs were used as guidelines for the sonic and compositional construction of the new ones. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, if, as in this case, one can clearly sense vitality and passion in the listening experience. Setting aside any questions of intent, the record is worth at least one listen because the songwriting and sound construction are of good quality, because Manson shows, both in her singing and in her lyrics, the expressiveness and distinctiveness of the good old days, and because this is without doubt the most emotionally impactful album since, precisely, the first two.

In 2021, approaching a new Garbage record means doing so with expectations running on fumes, toward a pop-rock project that already sounded plastic-y even back in the '90s, when guitars were still at the center of music lovers' conversations. That may be exactly why listening to No Gods No Masters, released in June 2021, ultimately leaves one less disappointed than expected, even with all the reservations one might have about a project that has stood still in time. No Gods No Masters sounds exactly as one would expect it to, with no surprises whatsoever, but it does so by offering up a bouquet of new songs that at least manage to safeguard the Wisconsin quartet's reputation. Between the slightly forced energy of "Godhead", the chart-friendly indie curves of "Anonymous XXX" and alt-pop anthems with emphasis pushed well past the red line (the eighties-leaning "Flipping The Bird"), the record still holds together, despite a few somewhat more tedious stretches ("Waiting For God", "A Woman Destroyed").

The real filler is hiding here more than on the deluxe edition, which is enriched by a second disc collecting covers, collaborations and tracks already released as singles. Among the covers, the standouts (if only for their obvious familiarity) are David Bowie's "Starman" and Patti Smith/Bruce Springsteen's "Because The Night", the latter performed together with Screaming Females. These are fairly faithful renditions of the originals, with just the guitars given a bit more prominence (Shirley could have dared a few more personal detours on the vocal lines). "Girls Talk" features a decisive contribution from Brody Dalle, "The Chemicals" one from Brian Aubert, while on "Destroying Angels" we find the welcome presence of Exene Cervenka and John Doe. Some of the non-new tracks included on the bonus disc have already been released, in limited-run pressings, for recent Record Store Day editions.

Let All That We Imagine Be The Light (2025), Garbage's eighth album, arrives thirty years after their debut and reconnects with the American quartet's alternative rock roots, with just a few modern touches but above all a harsh, existentialist lyrical attitude that makes the record the perfect soundtrack for 2025 – or at least for the more "seasoned" fans.

In the tracklist's raw songs, Shirley Manson sings of impossible loves and romantic escapes in a dystopian age, a burst of rebellion against a world that feels ever more threatening and ever more suffocating. Everything is ablaze, and the genuine passion burning within us – be it love, or enthusiasm for art and music, or a pure impulse to flee from evil – is the only weapon left to us to find some sense amid the madness.

All the songs thus convey a certain sense of apocalyptic urgency, of "rock at the end of the world", like one great outburst urging a final reckoning against a universe that has never understood us and has left us neither room nor choice. Within this outburst, Garbage still have plenty of good old rock'n'roll to play, but they're also happy to slip into gothic territory, as on "Have We Met (The Void)", a rather dark track that at times sounds like a Cure song.

A similar case can be made for the bleak "Radical", which tells in funereal tones of broken hearts and lost hopes, and for "Love To Give", a desperate yearning for resurrection. Fiery and angry, on the other hand, is the Nine Inch Nails-style electronic rock of "R U Happy Now", which addresses, with sardonic bite, some kind of divisive and destructive figure whose power cannot be stopped: he isn't named, but it isn't hard to picture a Donald Trump. Equally joyless is the (very '90s) electro/industrial moment of "Sisyphus", in which, drawing on the age-old figure from Greek mythology, Manson asks herself: "Will I be able to push that rock up the hill again, just like Sisyphus?". On "Chinese Fire Hose", meanwhile, Shirley tackles head-on the subject of the band's age (and her own), singing: "Aspetta un minuto, aspetta un fottuto minuto".

The album closes with "The Day That I Met God", the definitive existential cry – in the vein of "Running Up That Hill" – built on a musical crescendo with epic tones, betraying a dual nature, celestial and demonic at once, the same duality that can be found at various points throughout the album but never so clearly black-and-white (always speaking, of course, in terms of musical atmosphere).

In conclusion: Garbage's eighth album certainly sounds deeper rather than more powerful, more reflective rather than angry, and more shadowy rather than depressing. It's unquestionably a record that is a child of its era, analyzing and reflecting it through spasms of old-school rock and evenly distributed industrial touches; but in doing so it speaks above all to Garbage's own fanbase, and it seems unlikely that today's twenty-somethings will discover or get excited about this record – even though, given the themes it tackles, they would have every reason to.

Contributions by Stefano Fiori ("Not Your Kind Of People"), Stefano Bartolotta ("Strange Little Birds") and Claudio Lancia ("No Gods No Masters"), Andrea Campana ("Let All That We Imagine Be The Light")

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