Manic Street Preachers: Reflections On A Splintered World
The Welsh indie icons may know they are closer to the end than the beginning on their 15th studio album, but in amongst personal reflections on time passed, they remain as politically sharp as ever.
For a band nearing their 40th anniversary, you might think Manic Street Preachers have encountered – and conquered – every imaginable challenge. But as the Welsh indie icons convened for what would become their fifteenth studio album back in 2023, they realised that something was not quite right.
“If you go right back to the start, we would always have an MO,” explains frontman James Dean Bradfield, speaking on the phone with a cup of tea in hand, having wrapped up the school run on a crisp January morning.
“On ‘The Holy Bible’, Richie [Edwards] was looking at the world and turning his disgust back onto the world. On ‘Everything Must Go’, we just told ourselves that we wanted a reason to breathe. On ‘This Is My Truth…’, we wanted to go deeper into ourselves and see how we interact with the world. On [2021’s] ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’, it was a snowglobe created in a post-lockdown world.
“But on this album, there was no MO really. We couldn’t make one up. Usually Nicky [Wire, bassist and lyricist] would have that loose concept, but he couldn’t come up with one.”
Caught at a crossroads where nagging insecurity would have derailed many a band, the Manics called upon the full depth of their experience, recognising that a sense of danger and discomfort might be just what they needed to push ahead. “After a while, we just said, ‘Let’s see what we come up with.’ And what we came up with was a sense of freedom, really,” Bradfield continues. “On your fifteenth album, you should be able to come up with something good. And if you don’t, it just means you’ve run out of track and you’ve said everything you want to say.”
That resulting album - next month’s ‘Critical Thinking’ - is proof that the finish line is still nowhere in sight. A high-velocity juggernaut of relentless energy, the band’s knack for a tender, infectious melody locks horns with their impulse to craft the occasional anthemic chorus.
The other central tenet of their identity – their ability to serve as a barometer of the state of progressive politics – is also firmly intact here. The title track sees Wire turn his glare on what he appears to dismiss as the inane naivete of online ‘Be Kind’ culture. “It’s your lived experience, be your authentic self / Be fitter, be happier, speak your truth,” he sings, every word dripping in what Bradfield describes as “resigned sarcasm”.
To this band, empty words of bland positivity are no replacement for social action. “As what you might call old classic Valley socialists, we just prefer a good policy initiative to a buzzword,” Bradfield explains. “I’m just suspicious of them, the snake oil holistic slogans that go out there. When you see someone say ‘be kind’, you always find them just ripping the fuck out of somebody online the next day.”
As the band responsible for perhaps the two most politically explicit UK number one singles since The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ - ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ and ‘The Masses Against The Classes’ - their sentiments carry substantial weight. Brazenly working class and anti-capitalist in their output since their fearless 1992 debut ‘Generation Terrorists’, their spirit is untamed, and seeing them adapt as the tectonic plates shift towards populism and post-truth politics in the 2020s is fascinating.
With so much discourse now conducted on increasingly unpoliced social media platforms, Bradfield bemoans the extent to which our digital lives have splintered social movements into smithereens. “When it’s as easy to disagree with people that are supposedly on mainly the same side as you… When you find it’s as easy to disagree with them as it is to disagree with your natural opposition, then you know something is a bit fucked up,” he says. “That’s where I find myself politically sometimes.”
A younger Bradfield could often be found sporting a copy of the Socialist Workers Party’s Militant newspaper and bending people’s ears on subjects such as the armed struggle in Northern Ireland, but as he prepares to turn 56, he admits that he now believes people’s increasing reluctance to accept compromise is what is holding back progress. “The inability to disagree with each other in a civil way is quite alarming to me,” he notes. “I don’t mean that you can’t have extreme opinions, and I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to express those opinions, but the way that people persecute each other is not something that leads us to finding new ideas.”
Clearly in his element discussing politics, the singer needs no prompting to shift the conversation onto the newly re-inaugurated US president, who he says was “just smarter” than his Democrat opponent. “Somebody will turn that into, ‘He likes Trump, he said he’s smart’,” Bradfield quickly qualifies. “No, what I’m saying is it’s upsetting that he was smarter, he had a better playbook than them. You can’t just be a blue-sky thinker and virtue signaller. A politician has got two jobs: address people’s fears and address people’s hopes. He’s lying to do that, but he still got the power, didn’t he?”
He adds, for the record, that he is watching Keir Starmer “in an interested way”, although he notes that he does not “see any great love for him” and notes that he still thinks Labour are in a “perilous place” when it comes to the next general election.
Just as their politics remain in flux, so too do the band’s internal dynamics, with ‘Critical Thinking’ seeing Nicky Wire take on more vocal duties than ever before. As well as handling the aforementioned title track, the bassist sings lead on the achingly beautiful ‘Hiding In Plain Sight’ and the introspective closer ‘One Man Militia’.
Bradfield charmingly describes Wire’s vocal style as “indie Jagger” and is keen to clarify that ceding the front of stage to his bandmate more regularly is part of the natural process of the band’s evolution. If there is an impact on ego, then the band’s innate survival instinct easily overrides it: “I think we’re pretty good at putting things aside when we need to,” he quips. “That’s kind of why other bands split up and why we haven’t.”
The other tangible sign of progression on ‘Critical Thinking’ is the increase in Bradfield’s lyrical contributions – on the tracks ‘Brushstrokes Of Reunion’, ‘Out Of Time Revival’ and ‘Being Baptised’. While the frontman has been writing lyrics for many years, he’s been largely resistant to allowing them onto Manics LPs in the past – a tacit admission that they were not strong enough, he now reflects.
This time, he’s right to assess that his work easily crossed the threshold for inclusion. ‘Being Baptised’ sees him reminisce on an extraordinary day spent in the company of New Orleans R&B icon Allen Toussaint in the early 2010s, a positive meet-your-heroes tale in which the two geeked out over the specifics of recording equipment on Toussaint’s 1975 concept album ‘Southern Nights’.
“I woke up soaked to the bone / Was I being drowned or baptised?” Bradfield sings, echoing a quote Toussaint shared with him that day while reflecting on the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina on his hometown. In the Manics’ hands, the line crackles with the quiet dignity of perseverance, while Bradfield’s opening guitar motifs pays loving tribute to Glen Campbell’s marbly cover of ‘Southern Nights’.
The resonance of memories is, if anything, the binding tissue that holds ‘Critical Thinking’ together. The track ‘Dear Stephen’ arrives inspired by a long-forgotten postcard that Wire received from Morrissey in 1984 that the bassist uncovered while sorting through his late mother’s possessions. “Nicky’s mum Reenie used to send postcards to venues in Britain where she knew some of his favourite bands would be playing,” Bradfield explains. “Whether it be Voice Of The Beehive or That Petrol Emotion or The Smiths.”
Wire had been unwell for a number of weeks and was unable to make the Manchester band’s show at Cardiff University, despite being at the height of his gladioli-sporting fandom. Improbably, a return postcard duly arrived, reading: ‘Dear Nicholas, get well soon. Morrissey.’ “This inanimate object still had such a power over him,” Bradfield explains. “What is it the young people say, trigger? It triggered him, it just re-animated all these emotions and memories. It’s a shock that such a little bit of card could evoke so much.”
Similarly, ‘Brushstrokes Of Reunion’ is a song rooted in a deeply treasured item from Bradfield’s own life – a painting his mother created while undergoing chemotherapy and the only one she chose not to destroy. “That painting still informs my memory of what she used to say and do, how she used to scare me out of being the worst version of myself sometimes.”
For much of the album, the band are locked in their own brand of nostalgia, one that stops well short of mawkishness but is steeped in their past, as if the album is engaged in a conversation with the extraordinary span of time they have shared together. It goes without saying that over their musical lifespan, the landscape has transformed beyond recognition for guitar bands. The Manics are the product of the incredible fertility of late-’80s indie, where indelible bonds were forged between artists and their fanbases, fuelled by the fevered weekly music press of Melody Maker, Sounds and NME. As one of the most high-profile remaining bands from that era, it should be no surprise that their relationship with their audience is defined by a rare loyalty.
Ask Bradfield why he thinks Manics fans stand out among those of their peers, and he ponders. “They wanted to know more than just what the music told them,” he notes. “They want to know about what the band think, their background, their clothes, their politics. They want to know what our aesthetic of disgust is.”
After four decades, the band have given their followers all of it and more, seeing many groups in their cohort leave - some to return, even multiple times over. Sticking it out for the long game, though, has bestowed something different on the Manics: they have developed a maturity, a collective consciousness, and they will not give it up easily.
If negotiating a sense of discomfort at their initial lack of direction for ‘Critical Thinking’ proved to be little but a brief hiccup, then it’s hard to see how the future does not remain secure for them, too. Yet, in 2025, the trio are in no denial about their reality. “You do come down to simple maths equations sometimes,” Bradfield says. “We know we’re closer to the end than the beginning, because we’re on our fifteenth album and we know we’re not going to do another fifteen records.”
“Once you realise that you can still write songs together that surprise each other, then you become much more pragmatic about it all,” he says. “The simple question becomes, do you still enjoy what you do with each other? If you’re all good with that, then you carry on, because why would you stop doing something which is so fucking good?!”
‘Critical Thinking’ is out 14th February via Columbia.
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