The Manic Street Preachers are the Millerites of rock music. Their name always begged comparison to some form of sect, but their trajectory of wild ambition and apocalyptic chaos followed by decades of self-sustaining stability, resembles most closely the committed band of chiliasts led by William Miller in the antebellum US, who recruited acolytes in anticipation of an expected Millennium in 1844. The date passed without incident – an event followers would describe as ‘the Great Disappointment’ – but adherents continued to build up their sect nonetheless (it exists to this day, as the Seventh Day Adventists). The Manics, as they are universally known, were formed in 1986 but exploded out of South Wales in 1991 with their neo-punk third single, ‘Motown Junk’, in which they pledged to ‘destroy rock and roll’. In interviews, the group claimed that they would record one album of Situationist slogans and Marxist messages which, via the unlikely medium of Glam Metal, the late 1980s commercial genre spearheaded by the likes of Poison and Guns & Roses, would sell sixteen million copies. After changing the world thus, they would split up. Thirty-five years later, they’re still here, and have just released their fifteenth album, Critical Thinking, in which they survey with disdain the world of social media and its associated cults and moral panics, and find solace, as always, in art and in their own peculiar ethic of cussedness.

No band has been so fixated on failure as the Manics, ever since their initial mission statement fell severely short. Their first album, the bloated, frequently unlistenable and weirdly charming Glam Metal epic Generation Terrorists (1992), not only failed to set the world aflame – in the US, it didn’t even chart. But their cultural impact has been enormous, though not always upon music as such. Scratch most of the leftwing intellectuals born in Britain between 1975 and 1985 – particularly, if not exclusively, those from working-class or non-metropolitan backgrounds – and you’ll find a teenage Manic Street Preachers fan. Most are in some form of embarrassed denial about the fact – a dynamic neatly captured in Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s comic book Phonogram, a fantasy about pop music, memory and growing up. One character, scorning a friend who still listens to the Manics, describes the group as her ‘training bra, intellectually speaking – supportive to start with, but rapidly outgrown and traded in for something sexier’. Many in this cohort first encountered Warhol or Debord or Le Corbusier or Ballard via a Manic Street Preachers citation, and we don’t always like to be reminded of that fact.

The Manics have always courted embarrassment. They make bad taste music full of guitar solos and chanted slogans. They are an unlikely combination of the camp and the deadly earnest. They’ve always been convinced that popular music is of enormous intellectual and political import. And they wear their influences on their sleeve, literally – every album has a citation on the back cover. The Manics are the most perfect example of popular music that creates, in Mark Sinker’s phrase, a set of ‘Portals’ from one world into another. As a Manics fan in the 1990s, the Glam Metal CD you bought and took home contained an index: a reading list. Generation Terrorists collaged Plath, Rimbaud, Chuck D, Confucius, Valerie Solanas, Raoul Vaneigem and Philip Larkin, with a quote in the inner sleeve for each song, but since then there has been one reference per Manics album. These cover stars – in order, Primo Levi, Octave Mirbeau, Jackson Pollock, R.S. Thomas, Susan Sontag, René Descartes, Wyndham Lewis, George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Joan Didion – a sort of Penguin Classics checklist, are an indication of where the group’s minds were at on each record. On Critical Thinking, the quote is from Anne Sexton: ‘I am a collection of dismantled almosts’. As is so often the case, the band are talking about themselves, and the many times they’ve fallen short of their self-set goals.

Alongside their role as a ‘Portal’, the other analogy used to understand the Manics has always been ‘entryism’. In the early 1980s, journalists in the British music press trio of NME, Melody Maker and Sounds applied the Trotskyist term to bands who decided to use commercial musical forms to smuggle anarchist, socialist or Dada or Situationist slogans and analyses onto the radios and TVs of millions of people. Groups like Scritti Politti, ABC and Frankie Goes to Hollywood opted for a music of pure pleasure – electro-disco or synthetic soul. The Manics, socially mobile working-class boys from the mining town of Blackwood in the South Wales Valleys, the first in their families to go to university, went for the asexual, ostentatiously white and adolescent music that the young people who didn’t go to college listened to in places like theirs: what in America would be dubbed ‘heartland rock’. They also opted for a strict division of labour, in which the doe-eyed and leopard-print-clad Nicky Wire and Richey James (not the real names of Nick Jones and Richard Edwards) would come up with lyrics, slogans, sleeves and styles, while the diminutive drummer Sean Moore and singer James Dean Bradfield (which really is his real name) would create fittingly vast, anthemic canvases for the ideas.

The artifice behind this was audibly distorting. Listen to early Manics demos of the late 1980s, before the masterplan was devised, and you hear fey indie rock, typical of the time, in love with The Smiths and ‘jangle-pop’. Post-masterplan, Moore and Bradfield had to force themselves to emulate the macho, bombastic, wailing solos and crashing drums sound that was produced at great expense by super-skilled musicians in luxurious American studios. They were hindered rather than helped in that by the James/Wire lyrics, which were a hyper-erudite, reference-stuffed word salad unsuited perhaps for music of any kind, bar some sort of Germanic modernist sprechgesang. There was a convincing rock ballad on Generation Terrorists, the wonderful ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, but it exemplifies the conundrum. The chorus of ‘Paradise City’, the biggest hit by Guns & Roses, the Glam Metal group the Manics masterplan was bent on emulating, runs ‘take me down to the paradise city/where the grass is green and the girls are pretty’; its translation into ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ included the words ‘itemise’, ‘serf’, ‘orthodox’, ‘feudal’ and ‘counterfeit’. The subject of the song was not going to a great place and having a great time, but the inability of popular culture to provide a lasting salve for the wounds of class and capital.

Aside perhaps from during their brief moment of mass success in the second half of the 1990s, when they managed to ride, for a time, on the coattails of Oasis, very few Manic Street Preachers fans have ever been much interested in other music that sounds like the Manic Street Preachers. They’ve generally appealed to people who would never usually listen to this sort of thing: in the homes of the most dedicated Manics fans, their albums share shelf space with Magazine or Momus, not with Motley Crue or Metallica. And rather than being universal as intended, the group were deeply local, specifically, Welsh. It is no accident that the best writing about the Manics has come from people who, like the group, grew up in the South Wales Valleys, like Rhian E. Jones (in her contribution to the anthology Triptych) or Simon Price (in his book Everything).

Because of this gap between intention and reception, the teenage Manics fan often had to listen with a certain amount of indulgence. Sometimes, this was painful. I can recall a night in Southampton Guildhall in autumn 1996, during the tour for the Manics’ commercial breakthrough record Everything Must Go, trying to convince myself that the dour, immobile men in sportswear in front of me were the glamorous, sometimes shirtless, eyeliner-caked young gods I’d seen in the videos to sloganeering rushes like ‘You Love Us’ or ‘Faster’. But this also meant that when the Manics created something you knew was good, without having to convince yourself – the aforementioned ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’, ‘A Design for Life’ (1996), an ambiguous anthem of class pride, or ‘If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next’ (1998), an elegy for the Welsh members of the International Brigade – unclenching the cringe was an elating experience.

Ironically, the one canonical Manics album that can be listened to mostly without embarrassment was a reaction to the possibility of success. When, in 1993, they actually found themselves supporting the biggest 1980s Glam Metal group, Bon Jovi, on a stadium tour, the Manics were disheartened by the experience, and came up with a second, much stranger masterplan. Richey Edwards, the most erudite and most clinically depressed of this well-read, compulsively melancholic quartet, commandeered the group into a new style which replaced Glam with a weird aestheticization of the just-ended Cold War, dressing up in discarded Soviet uniforms, and accessorising their eyeliner with Apocalypse Now face paint. The album that came out of this was astonishing, a bolt from the blue.

The Holy Bible (1994) was a remarkably coherent and thoughtful, if violent and unreasonable protest against the ‘end of history’ that had been declared a couple of years earlier – theirs was the 1994 of Srebrenica and Rwanda, not of Fukuyama or Anthony Giddens. Musically, while hardly avantgarde, The Holy Bible had a newly acquired postpunk angularity and a disdain for the American marketplace. Subjects were political (‘Revol’, a bizarre song speculating on the sex lives of Soviet leaders), historical (two songs about the Holocaust, hugely ill-advised in theory but surprisingly tactful in practice), or concerned different forms of personal collapse, told in the first-person, as in the staccato, self-undermining assertions of ‘Faster’, or ventriloquised through female narrators, such as the depressive sex worker of ‘Yes’ and the anorexic teenager of the exceptionally disturbing ‘4st 7lb’.

These songs asserted physical and intellectual self-control to the point of psychosis, as a means of armouring the self against a terrifying and repugnant outside world. The Holy Bible is striking not just for Jones’s and, especially, Edwards’s punishingly moralistic and sometimes surreal lyrics, but for the fact that Bradfield and Moore were able to crowbar them into rock anthems, of a sort. The results can still send shivers up the spine, as when the brutal, unforgiving words of the disgust-filled, misanthropic ‘Of Walking Abortion’, or ‘Archives of Pain’, a Foucault-inverting paean to the guillotine, are bellowed as stadium rock choruses. In these songs Bradfield didn’t sing so much as ‘bark phonemes’, as Tom Ewing put it of the breathtaking ‘Faster’. Bradfield had managed to turn the amusicality of his two lyricists into a virtue, and ‘I am an architect; they call me a butcher’ into my personal favourite first line of a rock single.

It was an incredible performance, bearing no apparent resemblance to what the Manics had originally aimed to do – this wasn’t selling sixteen million copies in any lifetime – but there was no failure, now. The Manics had set out, to quote a Ballard interview sampled midway through the album, to ‘rub the human face in its own vomit, and then force it to look in the mirror’, and that’s what they did. There is still nothing in rock music quite like it, and it was practically impossible to follow.

This impression was only reinforced by Edwards’s disappearance, a presumed suicide, at the Severn Bridge in February 1995. The remaining three members regrouped and released Everything Must Go (1996) and This is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998), both of which were major commercial successes, at least in Britain (the group would never ‘break America’). These attempts at a sort of stadium Britpop alternately served as a subtle subversion of New Labour triumphalism, with proud invocations of Bevan and Scargill, or as a simple surrender. The group had, finally, sold a lot of records. Much of the money they raised was spent on a tour of blockaded Cuba. In Know Your Enemy (2000), the Manics started to make their politics more explicit – there were songs about Paul Robeson and Elian Gonzalez, and a Cuban flag on the cover of the number 1 single ‘The Masses against the Classes’. Rejecting the Britpop laddism the group had briefly flirted with on tour with Oasis, Nicky Wire started wearing dresses and make-up again.

Unfortunately, the musical results of this renewed effort at entryism were awful. With any teenage obsession, you can usually date the exact moment the spell is broken, and for me, it was with Know Your Enemy. On entering adulthood I could no longer pretend painfully clunky lyrics (such as ‘My Guernica’, in which Jones appears to compare himself to Picasso) and bad rock were in some way a Situationist conceptual experiment – though, in retrospect, I might have reserved some affection for the Stalinist singalong ‘Freedom of Speech Won’t Feed My Children’ (inspired by press criticisms of the Cuban tour and a handshake with Fidel). In the 2000s, one could have admired the way the group maintained an aggressive Communism at the moment when capitalist realism truly swept all before it, during one of the most culturally and politically barren decades of the last century, but that didn’t mean you had to force yourself to listen to them. So I missed much of what the Manics did in that decade – an intermittently attractive synthpop album, Lifeblood (2004), and Send Away the Tigers (2007), a gamely self-parodic series of tributes to themselves that is apparently a ‘fan favourite’. The group seemed to have settled into being everything they once hated – neither a great success nor a great failure, but a middling, mid-table, middle-aged rock band. There was no point in reviews telling the group how awful their fate was – as Jones’s deflated lyrics made clear, they knew very well.

And then, for a second time, they did something completely remarkable and completely unexpected. Journal for Plague Lovers (2009) was based on a notebook of lyrics Richey Edwards gave the group a couple of months before his disappearance; some of the sketches therein found their way into tracks that were demoed while he was still in the band, like the curt tribute to the war photographer ‘Kevin Carter’, or the pulverising, Nietzschean ‘Judge Yrself’. But most were left alone for being simply too strange, too unsingable even for Bradfield. At the end of the 2000s, the group sat down with the notebook’s ‘songs’ and started to write real songs around them. To create a stark and depressive mid-1990s mood, Steve Albini was roped in to produce, and the painter Jenny Saville, whose powerfully physical ‘Strategy: South Face/Front Face/North Face’ adorned The Holy Bible, contributed artwork: ‘Stare’, a 2005 painting of a bloodied youth with a passing resemblance to Edwards. Journal could have been a terrible work of nostalgia and self-exploitation. It was, in fact, the group’s second truly great album.

I can recall well the shock of how good it was; the shock wasn’t, this time, because of the nihilism and density of the words or the aggression and angularity of the music: quite the opposite. The words to Journal – most of them written in late 1994, while Edwards was hospitalised for depression and self-harm – are not furious so much as puzzling and puzzled, more Prynne than Plath. ‘All is Vanity’ imagined a DDR cure for depression, in which unhappiness would be alleviated by the elimination of consumer choice; ‘Marlon J.D.’ was a thrilling snapshot of dignity under attack, sketched from a scene of Marlon Brando being whipped in the face in Reflections in a Golden Eye; body dysmorphia is as much a presence as in The Holy Bible, only here refracted through experiments in cosmetics and genetics. Often, the words were both strange and funny: ‘Jackie Collins Existential Question Time’ and ‘Me & Stephen Hawking’ channelled Edwards’s asexual anxiety into humour rather than horror, ruefully declaring that he and the physicist ‘missed the sexual revolution/because we failed the physical’. Musically, the group were obviously enjoying themselves, creating knowing, quizzical, self-deconstructing tributes to their 1990s contemporaries (REM, Nirvana, Pixies). They sounded as surprised at how brilliant they could be if they tried as the listener was.

It wasn’t all good – it never was. Even the Manics’ best work produces at least one moment of acute embarrassment, usually due to the group’s sometimes exhilarating but frequently disastrous lack of good taste or good sense; while on The Holy Bible, a song about the Holocaust is followed with one about political correctness gone mad, on Journal for Plague Lovers, Bradfield tries to turn the line ‘this beauty here dipping neophobia’ into the refrain of a sensitive acoustic rock ballad. But Journal was unlike anything else being recorded in the 2000s, a new portal into some exceptionally peculiar zones of the mind. Since then, I’ve learned to make the effort – mostly if not always rewarded – to listen to each new Manics record. There have been several albums, usually at three-yearly intervals, all around 45 minutes long, as if to fit on an old-fashioned long-player or, more likely, on one side of a C90 cassette. Sometimes they’re straightforward attempts to recapture past glories, like Postcards from a Young Man (2010) or Resistance is Futile (2018), but there are also experiments, like Rewind the Film (2013) and Futurology (2014), which stand as their two best records after The Holy Bible and Journal for Plague Lovers. Somehow, by the 2010s the Manics were making music that I could imagine listening to if it wasn’t by the Manics.

Each of these two, recorded concurrently, has a clear concept, roughly speaking ‘home’ and ‘abroad’. Rewind the Film is one of the few rock records of the 2010s which communicates the gratuitous misery of austerity (the group are wealthy, of course, but you could hardly live in South Wales, as they do, and not see its effects). The mostly acoustic album’s sense of space and emptiness mirrors a blasted landscape of retail parks, motorways and stricken towns and villages that once manufactured something. On the closing song, ‘30-Year War’, this sense of waste is honed into one of the group’s few really coherent political statements, a pocket picture of a ‘mistruth so bewildering’, a spectacularly effective project of inflicting pain upon the majority dreamt up by a bafflingly successful Etonian elite. On Futurology, a miserable United Kingdom is counterposed to a utopian, largely imaginary Kraftwerkian Eastern Europe, in a set of optimistic songs of escape and modernist openness There were even instrumentals, in tribute to ‘Mayakovsky’ and the Welsh-founded Ukrainian coal-and-steel metropolis of Donetsk, originally Hughesovka, on ‘Dreaming a City’, inspired by Gwyn A. Williams’s short film about the city. Simon Reynolds, reviewing the group’s particularly Bonjoviesque second album Gold Against the Soul (1993), unkindly claimed that the Manics ‘didn’t have a musical bone in their bodies’. The criticism contains a grain of truth – the group have always been musically conservative, shaped by almost exclusively white influences, and have somehow managed to go for 35 years without once recording a song one can unironically dance to – but it wasn’t fair even then. Most obviously, James Dean Bradfield has always had a great voice, an alternately raging and yearning tenor.

If there’s something frustrating about the late Manics, it’s how they punctuate an increasingly impressive oeuvre with occasional Glam Metal albums, as if the entryism could still work, as if selling a load of CDs and LPs to 45-year-olds could ever be a form of, in Jones’s phrase (describing Postcards from a Young Man), ‘mass communication’. When The Ultra Vivid Lament (2021) went to number 1, the group were apparently delighted; the Manics are among the very few people left on earth who care what is at number one in the album charts. There’s also the inevitable repetitiveness. Jones writes three different kinds of lyrics – those about politics, those about art (such as on the terrific ‘International Blue’, an audacious stadium rock tribute to Yves Klein, the highlight of the mostly tedious Resistance is Futile), and those about sadness, sometimes personal, sometimes more generalised. This can get boring. Nicky Wire has been writing about being ‘the boy who once had a mission’ – to quote ‘Prologue to History’, a hilarious litany of self-hatred that is one of the group’s great songs – for nearly three decades. Jones’s modes are better when fused – what makes ‘If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next’ such a great song is not just the tribute to the courage of the Welsh international brigadier who declared ‘if I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists’ on his way to Spain, but also Jones’s honesty about his own lack of courage, the fact he knows he will never be fearless or clear-eyed enough to do the same.

In the interview round for Resistance is Futile in 2018, Bradfield made some mildly critical (and frankly baffling) comments to the Guardian about Jeremy Corbyn allegedly having a suspicion of heavy industry. Predictably, this became the headline, and one more strike in the newspaper’s incessant campaign to undermine the former Labour leader. It seemed as if the band were lining up as yet another group of wealthy Gen X men who refused, as socialists, to support the only chance in forty years for even a social-democratic government in Britain. This was not wholly accurate (at the time, Bradfield was working on an album about the life of Corbyn’s hero, the Chilean folk singer Victor Jara, and Jones apparently considered McDonnell to be not Stalinist enough). But the Manics were always much more comfortable praising Fidel Castro in the era of Blair and Clinton than joining the youthful masses in support of a plausible leftwing alternative in Britain. Nonetheless, it was particularly depressing in 2021, during the lockdown, to find that the Manics had released a new album featuring a song called ‘Orwellian’ about ‘cancel culture’.

The Ultra Vivid Lament was, that song aside, pretty great: an interesting and sometimes beautiful experiment, an ABBA-inspired attempt to write for keyboards rather than guitars. Its first song, ‘Still Snowing in Sapporo’, was a moving account of the group’s first Japanese tour in the early 1990s, and of the would-be world-changing confidence these pretty young men took with them there. Jones has written a lot of lyrics like this since 1996, but here they are elevated into the sublime by the soaring, crystalline arrangement. Critical Thinking is a spikier, more disorganised proposition. Its first and title track is one of several sung by Jones in recent albums – his nasal, heavily Valleys-accented whine has become an astringent counterpoint to the much more skilled Bradfield – and is a rant of ‘positive thinking’ clichés, apparently harvested from a hate-scroll on social media: ‘live your best life!’, he snaps, over a skanking post-punk rattle. ‘Speak truth to power!’ he cries; ‘Lived Experience!’. Near the song’s end, he produces the most appalling internet phrase of all: ‘Imposter Syndrome!’ and yells ‘Fuck that!’

‘Imposter syndrome’ is something the Manics have never suffered from, with their unembarrassed willingness to show off their bookshelves – nobody has ever seemed so proud of his 2:2 in Politics from the University of Swansea as Nicky Wire. Their horror at the idea that working-class people might suffer from such a simpering cringe is a very Manics horror, so alien to their refreshingly unabashed, if occasionally unwarranted confidence in their own intellects and abilities. After this highly entertaining title track, Critical Thinking settles into a typical late Manics groove, enjoyable but slightly inconsequential. ‘Decline and Fall’ and ‘Out of Time Revival’ are stadium krautrock of the sort that filled Futurology, and several songs are rather haunting, chiming mid-1980s indie rock, close to early REM or The Smiths, as if the grand Glam Metal masterplan had never intervened. One of these, ‘Dear Stephen’, implores mid-1980s indie hero Morrissey, now a vociferous supporter of the far-right groupuscule For Britain, to ‘come back to us’, abandoning the ‘hate’ he has openly espoused of late. This is unexpectedly forgiving for the Manics, but it is of a piece with the many songs on both The Ultra Vivid Lament and Critical Thinking that worry at social media, tech companies and the obsession with correct language on the part of the young. This can be exasperating – looking at the world in 2025, is there really nothing these three can get angrier about than the policing of online discourse? The group who found fascism lurking in every corner in the unlikely year of 1994 have released an album at a time where the radical right is resurgent everywhere, and its songs are about personal sorrow, discourse and why abstract art is better than figurative art.

Refusal of politeness in all its forms has always been part of the Manics repertoire, as heard in The Holy Bible’s notorious anti-political-correctness tirade ‘PCP’, but it doesn’t seem to be – unlike the angst of some of their contemporaries – a complaint against online-left touchstones like trans rights or anti-imperialism. That would be bizarre, given the frequently frock-clad Jones has written several songs about gender dysmorphia, and given the many declarations of hatred for the British Empire in the band’s voluminous corpus; the group that cited Chuck D on Generation Terrorists and Solomon Northup on the sleeve of ‘Faster’ seem unlikely to be upset by Critical Race Theory. I suspect it’s motivated by something else: fear, or a registering of someone else’s fear, and a rather fatherly one at that – the group’s children are all now young adults. Jeremy Deller, who once designed T-shirts for the Manics, and whose 1999 exhibition The Uses of Literacy comprised artworks made by Manics fans, once interviewed a group of secondary school pupils about why they couldn’t imagine something like rave culture happening today. Because people would be filming you, they replied. You’d be held up to public scrutiny, and very probably, public ridicule. The Manics, though, are people who used to wear dresses and Kylie Minogue T-shirts around a Valleys coalfield town, and learned in the process one of the most important lessons of pop music, as conveyed by Adam Ant: ‘ridicule is nothing to be scared of’. The title track of Critical Thinking asserts something similar: ‘I don’t want to be admired. I demand no respect’.

At the end of McKelvie and Gillen’s comic book Phonogram, another former teenage Manics fan, wronged by (male) teenage Manics fans and now living as a suburban housewife in denial of her own past, reaches some sort of rapprochement with herself when she hears ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ on the radio. She accepts her diminished existence and smiles to herself as Bradfield trills about ‘life sold cheaply, forever’. The question of defeat, both on a personal level, with the swift failure of the group’s masterplan, and on the more important level of the thirty – now forty – year war waged on their class, is at the heart of what makes the Manics so interesting, still. Do you accept it and move on? Do you bang your head continually against the same wall? Do you devise a means of self-preservation, to maintain yourself within it? Perhaps a first step is refusing to be ashamed of intelligence, to be unashamed of mass communication, and to be unashamed of what made you who you are. The Manics are useful in all of these efforts. So, I’ll start: my name is Owen Hatherley, and not only was I a teenage Manics fan, I am a Manics fan.

Read on: T. J. Clark, ‘For a Left with No Future’, NLR 74.