No Gods No Masters

"No Gods No Masters" is a song by American alternative rock band Garbage. It was released as the second single from the band's seventh studio album No Gods No Masters (2021) on April 28, 2021 by their independent label Stunvolume. Background and composition "No Gods No Masters" is an up-tempo synth-pop song, with prominent synths, a piano riff and a complex 192-notes bass line in the chorus. The bass line was written on a sequencer and later played by Eric Avery. The bridge is sung in falsetto. Singer Shirley Manson said it's one of the tracks on the album that required the most tinkering. Lyrically, "No Gods No Masters" was inspired by the rebellions against the governments' racism, misogyny and violations of human rights that Manson witnessed in North and South America during the making of Garbage's seventh studio album. In 2019, Manson took a trip to Santiago, Chile to participate in the making of the Peace Peace Now Now documentary on the violation of human rights during the Pinochet dictatorship. As Manson arrived to film, she and the rest of the crew witnessed a revolution of the Chilean against the abuses by the government where people made graffiti on historical buildings and landmarks as a sign of protest. As Manson voiced her dismay upon seeing the buildings vandalized, she was called out by the people she was with for not having compassion about the protesters, an awakening experience she recalls as "a slap in the face." A similar experience happened a few months later in Los Angeles with the Black Lives Matter movement, with people trying to take down monuments to the Confederacy, whereas she felt the government failed to recognize the value of human lives. Manson explained that the song's lyrics were also inspired by the people's tendency to care about their close ones, yet feeling detached and hurting other people, saying "[w]e all want good things for our babies, our families, our friends. And yet we so often then want to crush someone else's spirit, who's not our friend, who's not our baby, who's not our family." At the same time, she urges people to remain hopeful about the future and re-imagine a society "not making the same mistakes over and over again and allowing greed to corrupt our thinking."