Manic Street Preachers share new track ‘People Ruin Paintings’

Ahead of the release of their 15th(!) album later this month, Manic Street Preachers have offered up another track from it.

With the Welsh band due to release ‘Critical Thinking’ on 31st January 2025 via Columbia, they’ve now shared a third preview of the record in the form of ‘People Ruin Paintings’; a track that channels - according to the band themselves - “the three of us playing telepathically, referencing thirty plus years of playing together instinctively”. It follows on from the album’s previously-released cuts ‘Hiding In Plain Sight’ and ‘Decline & Fall’.

Speaking more about the album itself, Nicky Wire has said: “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.”

Watch the lyric video for ‘People Ruin Paintings’ below.