Garbage never planned on making an album like Let All That We Imagine Be The Light. But then again, nothing about this band has ever really been about a plan. The eighth studio album from the alternative rock underdogs wasn’t supposed to exist. Not yet, anyway. But when Shirley Manson’s body gave out mid-tour in 2024, after an old hip injury suddenly reared up, Garbage’s world tour behind No Gods No Masters came to a screeching halt. “It felt at the time like a curse,” Manson said, “but I actually think it was a gift. It gave us a brand-new shift in perspective.”

While Manson underwent surgery and began a grueling rehabilitation, her bandmates Butch Vig, Duke Erikson, and Steve Marker retreated to the studio. What emerged from the chaos was an album born of fragility and defiance. “Little sonic gifts via email,” Manson calls the demos they sent her during recovery. Songs that would ultimately become hymns to survival.

And survival is exactly what Let All That We Imagine Be The Light sounds like, at times even coming across like a mystical experience. The industrial grind and lush electronics that define Garbage’s sound are all still there, but a haunted tenderness courses underneath. “I had less interest in being forthright and more interest in trying to capture a feeling,” Manson says. “There’s a sense of mortality and vulnerability in there.”

That feeling runs deep across the album’s 11 tracks. There’s the scorching, dark humor of “Get Out My Face AKA Bad Kitty,” a snarling feminist takedown with the sharpest of claws, and the weary resignation of “Have We Met (The Void),” born from a crumbled love affair in Barcelona. “Sisyphus” and “Radical” double as wounded prayers, written during Manson’s most difficult days post-op. And through it all, she never flinches. “Each record feels like our last,” she says. “If you never get to sing again, what do you want to say?” The answer, it turns out, is hope. Not the naïve kind because Garbage has never trafficked in delusion, but something more defiant - love as resistance. “We’re all freaked out, we’re all hurtling toward the same fate,” Manson reflects. “Our challenge is how to live joyfully in the circumstances we’re given.”

Produced by the band and longtime engineer Billy Bush, the record was stitched together in Vig’s Grunge Is Dead studio, Shirley’s bedroom, and everywhere in between. And while the sound is unmistakably Garbage, the spirit is something new. This is an album where vulnerability becomes strength, and pain becomes light.