It has been almost a week since Garbage released their seventh studio album, No Gods No Masters, and one track has stood out in particular to fans.
“The Creeps” is a telling tale of anxiety and defeat as singer Shirley Manson recalls the horrifying moment she was dropped by her label, Interscope Records, in 2009. While the singer has kept these lyrics rolling around in her mind for 12 years, unable to find the right words until now, “The Creeps” delivers on the high anxiety and crushing rejection one might feel when the question of, “what now?” is too real to comprehend.
The track’s accompanying video – directed by Javi Miamor – follows the animations of previous singles, “The Men Who Rule The World” and “Wolves.”
“I’ve had these lyrics in my life now for 12 years. And I keep trying to inject them into an idea and it’s never really worked because they’re really precious to me and they speak of this moment in my life when I finally got dropped by Interscope Records. The band had been dropped a while previous to that but I personally got dropped. I got a phone call from my lawyer telling me, ‘I’m really sorry but Interscope Records are dropping you this morning.’ I’m like, ‘Okay.’ And I was trying to be brave, you know, and flick my hair and act like I didn’t care. I got into my car and I was driving along Los Feliz Boulevard, which is a big street very close to my home and, to my right as I was passing by, there was an enormous life-sized poster of Garbage being sold in a garage sale. And it had like one of these yellow selling signs on it, I think it was something like three bucks. And I just felt in that moment the lowest I think I’ve ever felt, aside from losing people. I was utterly devastated. And I felt deep shame, As I’m sure most people can imagine, I don’t suffer from shame very often. It’s not an emotion I really carry with me very often.”
“I really felt like I was literally being put in the garbage. It was humiliating and I was devastated. And I burst into tears and I sort of slumped down in my seat and I drove on. But that was the moment really when I started redesigning myself, outside of other people’s gaze and outside of other people’s opinions. It was a moment of independence where I suddenly started to just rebuild myself with a strong foundation rather than a wibbly wobbly one, which I think I’ve I definitely suffered from terribly when I was young,” shared Manson with The New Cue.
Check out the video for “The Creeps” below:
