Manic Street Preachers new single Hiding In Plain Sight is released today (October 25) - and it features bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire on lead vocals for the first time.
The band have also released details of their fifteenth studio album, Critical Thinking, which is released on 31 January 2025.
Hiding In Plain Sight was inspired by a line from the poet Anne Sexton [“I am a collection of dismantled almosts”] and is described by the band as a blend of “the 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 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).
Nick Wire also says of the new album: “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, guitarist/lead vocalist] which look for and hopefully find answers in people, their memories, language and beliefs.”
Wire adds: “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 album will be available on LP, CD, hardbook CD and cassette with two brand new songs available on a limited 7”, a remix of Decline & Fall by Steven Wilson and demo versions of all the new album tracks on an extended CD.
Manic Street Preachers tour the UK in April and May 2025.
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