Manic Street Preachers have announced details of their fifteenth studio album “Critical Thinking” out on January 31st 2025 on Columbia Records. The band have also released a new single, called ‘Hiding In Plain Sight’ and also announced a run of UK tour dates. The band will perform the new single on Later…with Jools Holland on Saturday night.
Recorded at the band’s Door To The River Studio and Rockfield, Monmouth, for the first time in their career a single features a lead vocal by Nicky Wire and added soulful vocals by Lana McDonagh. It was produced by the band with regular collaborators Dave Eringa and Loz Williams and mixed by Caesar Edmunds (St Vincent/Wet Leg).
Initially inspired by a line from the poet Anne Sexton (“I am a collection of dismantled almosts”), ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’ contrasts a wistful vocal ripe with fearful midlife nostalgia – one in which the writer longs to “keep the curtains drawn all day” – with an uplifting melody, and soaring string stings and a super guitar riff from James Dean Bradfield, with echoes of their “Postcards from a Young Man” album, they say it “draws on classic ’70s rock’n’roll of The Only Ones, Cockney Rebel and the loose flow of Dinosaur Jr’s ‘Freak Scene’”
Manic Street Preachers’ Nicky Wire on “Critical Thinking”: “This is a record of opposites colliding – of dialectics trying to find a path of resolution. While the music has an effervescence and an elegiac uplift, most of the words deal with the cold analysis of the self, the exception being the three lyrics by James (Dean Bradfield) which look for and hopefully find answers in people, their memories, language and beliefs.
Recording could sometimes be sporadic and isolated, at other times we played live in a band setting, again the opposites making sense with each other. There are crises at the heart of these songs. They are microcosms of skepticism and suspicion, the drive to the internal seems inevitable – start with yourself, maybe the rest will follow.”
Speaking to Mojo Magazine, James Dean Bradfield said “Sometimes just to have your best songs is enough, just putting a record out and not trying to describe a big overarching concept, even though there is a thread there.”
The record is available on LP, CD, hardbook CD and cassette with two brand new songs available on a limited 7”, a remix of ‘Decline & Fall’ by Steven Wilson and demo versions of all the new album tracks on an extended CD.
The Fat Angel Sings 