THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Critical Thinking is Manic Street Preachers’ 15th studio album. It celebrates conflicting ideas, with unflinchingly soul-searching lyrics meeting some of the most head-on, addictive melodies the band have ever recorded.
“This is a record of opposites colliding — of dialectics trying to find a path of resolution,” says bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire. “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, the band’s singer-guitarist) 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.”
Adds Bradfield: “Sometimes just to have your best songs is enough, just putting a record out and not trying to describe a big overarching concept, even though there is a thread there.”
Initially inspired by a line from the poet Anne Sexton (“I am a collection of dismantled almosts”), the single 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. Recorded at the band’s Door To The River Studio and Rockfield, Monmouth, the song features a lead vocal by Wire and added vocals by Lana McDonagh. It was produced by the band with regular collaborators Dave Eringa and Loz Williams, and mixed by Caesar Edmunds (St Vincent / Wet Leg).”
