Manic Street Preachers today, on Friday January 10, released a new single, the latest song from the upcoming 15th album Critical Thinkingwhich will be released at the end of this month. It’s about an emotional song with happy tones, called People Ruin Paintingswhich follows the previous singles Decline & Fall i Hiding In Plain Sight. Interestingly, the latter was the first single Manic Street Preachers with bassist Nicky Wire’s vocals.
In promotional materials regarding Critical Thinkingthe band explained the song’s lyrical and musical themes People Ruin Paintings:
“The narcissism of the explorer, the hypocrisy of the carbon footprint – the empty evangelists of television travel shows embraced by a cynical inverted nihilism. Human insatiable need to discover and exploit. The soft beat of 10,000 Maniacs. As a trio we played telepathically, drawing on over three decades of playing together.”
Critical Thinking is the Welsh trio’s first album since 2021 and album The Ultra Vivid Lament, which became their first number one album since This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours from 1998. Later this year, they will embark on a sold-out tour of the UK, and will perform at a number of festivals throughout the summer.
About the album announcement Critical Thinking, Wire said:
“This is an album of conflicting opposites – a dialectic trying to find a solution. While the music has a clear and uplifting tone, most of the words deal with cold self-analysis, the exception being the three lyrics by James (Dean Bradfield) that seek and hopefully find answers in people, their memories, language and beliefs.
The music is energetic and sometimes euphoric. Recording was sometimes sporadic and isolated, while sometimes we got together and played live as a band, again opposites that made sense together. There are crises at the heart of these songs. They are a microcosm of skepticism and doubt, it is inevitable to focus inward – start with yourself, maybe the rest will follow.”
Source: balkanrock.com
