Welsh rock / alternative trio Manic Street Preachers have announced the release of their fifteenth studio album ‘Critical Thinking‘.
They have also shared their new single “Hiding in Plain Sight“, featuring for the first time, lead vocals from bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire. The record will be out on 31st January 2025, via Columbia. Pre-order your copy here.
‘Critical Thinking’ celebrates conflicting ideas colliding, with unflinchingly soul-searching lyrics meeting some of the most head-on, addictive melodies the band have ever recorded.
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.
The music is energised and at times euphoric. 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.”
Initially inspired by a line from the poet Anne Sexton (“I am a collection of dismantled almosts”), ‘Hiding in Plain Sight’ contrasts a fearful midlife nostalgia – one in which the writer longs to “keep the curtains drawn all day” – with a gloriously uplifting melody that draws on classic ’70s rock’n’roll of The Only Ones, Cockney Rebel and the loose flow of Dinosaur Jr’s ‘Freak Scene’.
The song was produced by the band with regular collaborators Dave Eringa and Loz Williams and mixed by Caesar Edmunds (St Vincent/Wet Leg).
Checdk out below. followed by the album’s tracklist.
Manic Street Preachers will tour the UK in Spring 2025. See the dates below.
April 2025
Fri 11th – Glasgow Barrowland
Sat 12th – Glasgow Barrowland
Fri 18th – London O2 Shepherds Bush Empire
Sat 19th – London O2 Shepherds Bush Empire
Fri 25th – Wolverhampton The Civic At The Halls
Sat 26th – Bristol Beacon
May 2025
Fri 2nd – Manchester O2 Apollo
Sat 3rd – Manchester O2 Apollo
Fri 9th – Swansea Arena
Sat 10th – Swansea Arena
