Manic Street Preachers materialised in 1991 as indie rock’s self-styled Generation Terrorists (as they dubbed themselves on their debut album), but by the middle of the decade these working-class insurgents from the ravaged industrial heartland of south Wales were signed-up members of Club Britpop.
Britpop quickly soured, its death knell sounded somewhere between Blur’s much too clever The Great Escape and Oasis’s far too mindless Be Here Now. As British rock descended into lad-mag boorishness, not everyone got away untainted; some artists bear the scars to this day.
But the Manics dusted themselves down and moved on – and their riveting 15th studio LP, Critical Thinking, sees these one-time angry young men satisfyingly taking flight as grumpy older gentlemen aghast at the condition of the world.
Heartfelt, hummable, drizzled in nostalgia yet always looking to the future, it carries on with the optimistic trajectory the band have followed in recent years – and which was on display when they delivered an endearingly frills-free gig at Trinity College Dublin last summer.
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Co-headlining with Suede, the Manics had drawn the short straw of going on first. But an agreeably mellow set was just what you wanted before Suede’s Brett Anderson arrived and commenced shaking his bum. It was also a gratifying contrast from their prepandemic show at the RDS in Dublin supporting Bon Jovi. In leafiest south Dublin, the Manics whizzed through their hits in front of an audience who wouldn’t know the difference between A Design for Life, with its George Orwell-inspired lyrics, and Interior Design Masters with Alan Carr.
Critical Thinking coincides with the 30th anniversary of the disappearance of Richey Edwards, the group’s lyricist and founder member, whose abandoned car was discovered at the Severn Bridge, which connects England and Wales. In the intervening period they have engaged with Edwards’s absence in various ways, whether by chasing the chimera of mainstream success with Everything Must Go, their 1996 album, or delving into their comrade’s trove of unused lyrics on Journal for Plague Lovers, which they released 13 years later.
On Critical Thinking the bassist Nicky Wire, singer James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore reckon with a more universal subject: their own procession through middle age. In their late 50s, they have come to personify a greying indie establishment their younger selves would have loathed. On the new LP they try to make peace with this cruel fate.
Their coping method is to stay angry. You can hear it in the call-and-response punk fury of the title track, where Wire glowers balefully at the modern world and lists his many pet peeves – in particular, grifters on social media who promise easy answers to complex problems (“Live your best life / Be kind/ Be your authentic self”).
It’s a scream into the void – a reminder that nobody rants better than the Manics. But they are equally accomplished at singalong alternative rock with a sugary glaze of ennui. That point is demonstrated on the beautifully mournful Decline and Fall and Dear Stephen, the latter of which is a lament for the descent into grumpy-old-man purgatory of Steven Patrick Morrissey. It is the sound of the Manics doubling down on their core tenets: that barbed lyrics and soft-rock melody can exist in harmony, like a brutalist tower block overlooking a rose garden.
Wire recently lamented that he didn’t feel “particularly energised” during the recording of Critical Thinking. But there is little evidence of autumnal malaise on an album that ranks as one of the Manics’ most rounded, accessible and emotive since the 2007 reboot that was Send Away the Tigers, on which they arrested their flow into postfame listlessness.
For all their ferocity, the Manics were never averse to an effervescent indie anthem, and that side of their songwriting was especially to the fore in the immediate aftermath of Edwards’s disappearance. That facility for treading softly while retaining their bite is front and centre of the melancholic Hiding in Plain Sight, where Wire – temporarily taking over from Bradfield as frontman – grieves days gone, never to return. Here is nostalgia as a pulsating wound scabbing your soul, the raw ache you can’t stop prodding.
Bradfield is back for the plaintive, riff-heavy People Ruin Paintings and the hazy Being Baptised, both of which build to beautifully cathartic climaxes. Such moments are a reminder that, 3½ decades in, the Manics represent consistency in a world gone mad, drab and sad. They were there before Britpop and have survived its ravages. They will no doubt continue to stand tall when the Oasis reunion tour has come and gone, a band always looking to the horizon, brimming with anger and sincerity but, most of all, feeling compelled to carry for as long as possible.
