Manic Street Preachers tease new material: “So much for the Decline & Fall”
Manic Street Preachers have teased new material with a clip of new music on their social media – check out the snippet and its accompanying visual below.
The band captioned the post on Monday (August 26) with the words, “So much for the Decline & Fall’.
The 20-second clip features a triumphant, rising guitar riff and frenzied drumming, while the video clip opens with a quote from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas: “The highest hymns of the sun are written in the dark”.
The instrumental clip, which stutters with static interruptions, also includes phrases that follow a similar pattern to the caption: “So much for calculations”, “So much for standing tall”, “So much for implications”, before finally concluding with the same words: “So much for the Decline & Fall”. Watch below.
The band discussed their next album in an interview with Louder Sound in June, which they described at the time as “ninety per cent done” and likely to come out in January or February 2025.
“It has a lot of energy, even though I don’t feel particularly energised,” frontman James Dean Bradfield said. “One of the songs is like a mixture of The Cardigans and The Skids, who are two of our favourite bands, and another sounds like ‘Come Up And See Me’ [by Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel] played by Dinosaur Jr.”
The last Manics album was ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’ in 2021, their first Number One record in 23 years, In a four star review, NME wrote: “The record has its flaws – the odd misguided lyric, the occasional slip into by-numbers pop melodies – but there’s plenty of space for those mistakes to be made. ‘Orwellian’’s clunky lambast of the modern world (“We live in Orwellian times / It feels impossible to pick a side”), for instance, is rescued by its gloriously melodramatic instrumental. In the end, they are minor bumps in a record of intense beauty, among the best of the Manics’ records this century.”
Since then, they have re-released their albums ‘Know Your Enemy’ in 2022 and ‘Lifeblood’ earlier this year, while last year Nicky Wire surprise released his solo album ‘Intimism’.
Wire currently has an art exhibition, My Little Empire, running at the Narbeth Museum in Pembrokeshire until December, featuring 26 pieces that showcase his love of the Polaroid image.
The band are also set to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their 1994 album ‘The Holy Bible’ with a one-off screening on August 30 of the concert film BePure-BeVigilant-Behave.
The Manics have also been confirmed to play at Rockin’ On Sonic festival in Japan in January, alongside Pulp, Weezer and Primal Scream.
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Max Pilley
NME
