Manic Street Preachers have announced their new album ‘Critical Thinking’ for January 2025

Manic Street Preachers have announced their fifteenth studio album.

‘Critical Thinking’ is set for release on 31st January 2025 via Columbia Records, and will be supported by a UK headline tour throughout spring.

The band have also shared a new single, ‘Hiding In Plain Sight’, which features lead vocals from bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire for the first time.

Inspired by poet Anne Sexton’s line “I am a collection of dismantled almosts”, the track was recorded at Door To The River Studio and Rockfield, Monmouth.

Speaking about the album, Nicky Wire explains: “This is a record of opposites colliding – of dialectics trying to find a path of resolution. 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) 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.”

The dates in full read:

APRIL
11 Glasgow Barrowland
12 Glasgow Barrowland
18 London O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire
19 London O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire
25 Wolverhampton The Civic at the Halls
26 Bristol Beacon

MAY
2 Manchester O2 Apollo
3 Manchester O2 Apollo
9 Swansea Arena
10 Swansea Arena