With Friday's announcement of their next studio album, Critical Thinking, Manic Street Preachers unveiled a new track and video. The first single release with lead vocals by Nicky Wire, "Hiding in Plain Sight" is a look backward to look forward. A reckoning with the person one once was, and an effort to reclaim that vibe, the lyrics hint at an awareness of time's march, even with a nostalgia for a golden past. It's wonderful, obviously.
Wire's voice echoes Ian McCulloch's here, and with James Dean Bradfield's lyrical guitar solo, and Sean Moore's assured drumming, this music catches fire on its own unique terms. The obsessions with their own history -- particularly Nicky Wire's -- continue, but the Manics seem to have found peace with their continued surveying of their own history. For a band who once sang, "What's the point in always looking back when all you see is more and more junk?", the trio sounds at peace here with their own ghosts. Nods to Richey Edwards and their glam days abound here in the video from director Kieran Evans, lit as it is in a nearly-sepia-tone. That is, it's lit that way until the technicolor finish with Nicky at his dapper best. I love this on a visual level almost as much as I love the tune itself.
Critical Thinking by Manic Street Preachers will be out on January 25. Details via the band's official website.
[Photo: Alex Lake, 2024]