Garbage – Strange Little Birds

 

In June 2015, Shirley Manson described the new songs to Digital Spy:

I’ve been talking about it, from a lyrical standpoint, being the most romantic. When I say romance, I mean the romance of living as opposed to "man and woman get together and make sweet love" – I don’t mean it that way. It’s a soft record in a funny way, my softest romantic record.

She also said the new album is inspired by growing older and more fearless:

Your relationship changes with your own life as you get older and it’s so strange to be celebrating our 20th anniversary and one minute you’re young and the next minute you’re like, "Wow I’m an adult, this is insane.” I’ve lived almost half a century and it just changes your relationship to everything in a funny way and how you see things. Once I was so hostile and so fearful that I was really aggressive all the time and now I feel like I’m not scared anymore for whatever reason. There’s something incredibly great about getting older that nobody ever seems to talk about, and for me it was [that] the fear dropped away completely and I felt fearless, and that changed everything for me.

 

On March 15th, Billboard published a new interview with Butch Vig. Although he was mainly talking about a new documentary about Smart Studios (where Garbage recorded their first four albums and where many other bands also recorded, including Nirvana's Nevermind), he also revealed a little info about Strange Little Birds: 

I think it’s quite different for us. It’s very cinematic and there are a lot of sonic moments on the record that are not necessarily typical Garbage. We sort of took the rock out and deconstructed the songs, made them more vulnerable-sounding. Some moments get completely crazy, completely blown out. I think it’s one of those records people are going to listen to the first time and go, "Wow, what was that?" They’re gonna need to hear it a couple times to get into it. But we’re really happy with it. We hope Garbage fans will find it as interesting as we do.