EVER since I was a nine-year-old boy, the Manic Street Preachers have been my favourite band. My love of the work of James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore in addition to the missing and legally presumed dead Richey Edwards began with a ‘borrowing’ of Dad’s tape of Everything Must Go. I say ‘borrowing’ because I listened to it so much that I wore out the tape.

You’d think 25 years later (I know, I don’t look it), that things might be a bit same-y, or that I was holding on for the sake of nostalgia but that isn’t the case. Here we are on Album 15, and here’s the real reason that love persists; the Manics do what many bands of their era perhaps don’t in some cases, and that’s they still offer something new on every album.

Some might argue that the Manics ‘aren’t the same’ as they were on their angry, world domination seeking first three albums between 1992 and 1994 and that’s a very valid opinion. But just like I’m not the same person as I was aged nine, it’s impossible to expect the Manic Street Preachers to be the same now aged 56 and 57 as they were 31 years ago.

After two sets of delays, Critical Thinking has finally landed and the first question you might ask is ‘Was it worth the wait?’. The answer is a resounding, emphatic yes. After the very Abba inspired ‘Ultra Vivid Lament’ from 2021, the Manics go in a different direction again with this album.

On the title track, Nicky Wire is angry. Critical Thinking is a departure from the traditional Manics track as it primarily comprises of Wire in spoken word, making clear some observations about his dislike for certain aspects of ‘modern day internet culture’, with a particular aim at the concept of the ‘wellness industry’. The end result is a delicious stomp to kick off proceedings.

Rather than raging against the dying of the light, the album sees the Manics looking directly in the mirror and assessing their place in the world around them. The terrific Being Baptised, for example is written about a day that James Dean Bradfield spent in the company of one of his musical heroes, Allen Touissant.

There’s even what you could call a ‘prequel’ to the haunting Ocean Spray from the 2001 album Know Your Enemy in the form of ‘Brushstrokes of Reunion’. The former was written two years after the death of James Dean Bradfield’s mother from cancer, with Ocean Spray being the drink she would ask to be brought in.

In Brushstrokes of Reunion, Bradfield reflects on his mother’s coping mechanism of painting in the prism of an artwork of hers that he kept, with him commenting in interviews that the artwork has something of a hypnotic quality to him in the sense whenever he looks at it, he feels calm.

As far as the album goes, it’s a five star from me, because to put it simply, it is absolutely mesmeric.