Manic Street Preachers – ‘Critical Thinking’ review: former generation terrorists shoot hope through doubt

12 February, 2025

Manic Street Preachers, 2025. Credit: Alex Lake

Nicky Wire is mad as hell – and he ain’t gonna take it anymore. “It’s OK to not be OK / Live your best life / Be kind / Have some empathy / Speak truth to power…” No, it’s not an update on Baz Luhrman’s ‘Everybody’s Free’, but a snarky diatribe – set to a stomping PiL battle march – spitting back at the false empathy in social media’s conveyor belt of empty platitudes, leading us to “an aesthetic so bland” and “a cul-de-sac of a non-descript nowhere land”. PARKLIFE!…Nope.

The opening title track of Manic Street Preachers’ 15th album ‘Critical Thinking’ finds the motor-mouthed, sabre-rattling bassist and lyricist Wire aghast and rudderless in a fractured world. The storied, once sloganeering generation terrorists and NME Godlike Genius alumni who barked “You love us” and “I am an arch-i-tect” have come to realise there’s no absolute design for life, but that’s no reason to give up the fight on one of their own. Take ‘Decline & Fall’ – a slab of textbook ‘Everything Must Go‘-sized bittersweet euphoria where frontman James Dean Bradfield sings for the tiny victories won in a waning world: “Society used to be my worst enemy, now I want to build a small one for you and me”.

‘Hiding In Plain Sight’ is another Wire-fronted gem, with analogue-feel ‘80s indie to heighten his reckoning with the man in the mirror: “I wanna be in love with the man I used to be, in a decade I felt free”. ‘Dear Stephen’, meanwhile, sees Bradfield conjure the fretwork of Johnny Marr and sing of Wire’s forever-delayed reply to a postcard he once received from Morrissey when he couldn’t make a Smiths gig as a teen. He longs for the more pure connection he once felt with the controversial quiff-Grinch in his adolescence as he paraphrases the man himself: “It’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be kind”.

Hope shot through yearning and doubt ring out on the early R.E.M.-indebted nostalgia anthem ‘Brush Strokes Of Reunion’ and the celebration of pure truth in nature on ‘People Ruin Paintings’. Elsewhere, the Bradfield-penned ‘Being Baptised’ more explicitly finds answers among Wire’s questioning: “I can walk in the room and bring the sunshine with me, bring the darkness down on this town.”

Sonically, ‘Critical Thinking’ has touches of the European modernist propulsion of 2014 renaissance record ‘Futurology’ and the graceful ABBA pop flourishes of 2021 predecessor ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’. But its uplifting warmth met with provocative spikiness feels like an album written staring up at the posters of their teenage art-pop and indie heroes – meant for the crackle of a record or the buzz of a cassette. In that comfort, they find the ammo to protest how only the Manics can: “A single bird sings a sweet old song / A fitting sound for a world so wrong”, as they put it on ‘Late Day Peaks’.

Book-ended with another Wire rallying cry in the aptly-named ‘OneManMilitia’, ‘Critical Thinking’ ends with the acceptance that “I don’t know what I am for, but I know I am against”. Met with the void, the Manics battle on to fill it with beauty and rage.