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Garbage Shirk Their Dark Side in ‘Big Bright World’ Video

A few months ago, Garbage released their first new album in seven years, Not Your Kind of People, and with it, a black-and-white, silent-film-like video for the song “Blood and Poppies.” Today, they’ve released another black-and-white video for the record’s “Big Bright World,” but this one has a few Wizard of Oz-like moments.

The clip, which was directed by L.A.-based artist Julie Orser, finds singer Shirley Manson singing about raging “against the dying light,” even though she’s usually dressed in blacker-than-goth-black blacks, including a black veil. The camera shows close-ups of weathered religious statutes, shimmering, black oceans and people falling into swimming pools. Then there are those vibrant, color scenes where a woman wearing a white and red dress dives deeper into the pool (which, for some reason, has a candlestick holder in it). Color scenes become more and more frequent by the end of the video, all while Manson sings from behind her veil, until it ends with a puff of inky black smoke.

“Magnify the best inside me… the parts that won’t give out when things get hard,” by showing glimmers of hope. It’s particularly revealing since it’s coming from the woman who told us this in April: “I have a certain tendency towards the dark that defines me as a singer. I’m not a show-pony girl. I’m not all bright and pink and fluffy. I look at the world with a slight melancholy, always.” It’s nice when the color comes through.