The lyricist admits that this time the words are “definitely an exploration of internal galaxies” with him “digging deeper into himself” and looking through his own personal filter of the world.
A mixture of sadness and love hangs over the record, with Wire having lost both his parents in recent years. ‘Orwellian’, ‘The Secret He Had Missed’ and ‘Into The Waves Of Love’ still carry the DNA of the aching arena Manics you love, but with a tad more Scandi-pop restraint and a sci-fi sheen.īradfield allowed for that moody sense of space by starting the songs on piano rather than guitar, as he did with his 2020 solo album ‘Even In Exile’, and having the listener really focus on the words, which he hails as “most concise and beautiful set of lyrics that Nick had given me in over 10 years”. ‘Quest For Ancient Colour’ dances like ABBA’s best heartbroken dancefloor moments but decorated by some space-age guitar work, while ‘Diapause’ has echoes of Bowie’s retro-futuristic ‘Low’ era. Opener ‘Still Snowing In Sapporo’ uses some eerie post-rock soundscapes to evoke fever dream memories of the happier times of the band’s 1993 Japanese tour, before blooming into a rushing bullet-train chorus. The album is still driven by drama and a sense of compulsion, taking the experimental energy previously explored on 2004’s frosty flop ‘Lifeblood’ and 2014’s career-high of European modernism ‘Futurology’, with what Wire calls “traces of high futurism”. “It’s what we would call pop in our world,” he says, “It’s that glacial kind of controlled energy that comes out in something melancholic, but uplifting.” Wire says it blends the punk spirit of ‘London Calling’ era The Clash with the elegiac grace of ABBA‘s ‘Waterloo’ and the sleepy sadness of Echo & The Bunnymen’s ‘Bring On The Dancing Horses’. Bradfield compares it to “the element of being lost in a snowglobe” – but this isn’t the Manics’ Enya-inspired bath-time album. While still anthemic, ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’ has much more of a tender, delicate and subtle approach. It’s in sharp contrast to 2018 predecessor ‘Resistance Is Futile’, which was a trad Manics tour-de-force rush of arena pomp – or, as Wire calls it: “a big, bold, technicolour pick and mix, a plotted history of Manic Street Preachers”. That hazy dream-state sensation led to the Manics creating one of their most spacious and ethereal works to date. Writing music was a way of pinching myself to say, ‘There’s still a part of life that works in the same way that it did, albeit in a strange way’.”
Lockdown had the element of a waking dream for a lot of people, especially the first one last year. “The escape was literally checking to see that the world around you wasn’t crumbling when you wrote a song. “To actually have a theory about life or a loose concept that you could hang a record on seemed impossible,” Bradfield tells NME. For once there was no soapbox and no manifesto, just music and the search for a reason to exist. Instead, they used music as a means to question what was real and what was not. Frontman James Dean Bradfield had previously said that writing songs about lockdown would be “ adding insult to injury” given that we’ve all been sat stewing in this new reality for long enough.
New album ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’ is certainly not a COVID album, but one born of a certain shared emotional landscape. You see the tragedy and agony unfolding around you and it feels a bit glib to say something like that.” “I can deal with isolation and have always embraced utter boredom quite easily. “I’m a very patient and lonely person,” he admits. These are themes that have run throughout their 35-year career and soon-to-be 14 albums – from their early days as Kohl-eyed dolls in the forgotten Welsh valley mining town of Blackwood to becoming the tragedy-stricken polemists of ‘The Holy Bible’ and later stadium-filling Britpop outsiders.Īs bassist, lyricist and band strategist Nicky Wire tells NME today, they’re well-versed in feeling apart from everything else. On the political glam-punk explosion of their 1992 debut album ‘Generation Terrorists’, they sang of living in the glow of “ neon loneliness” on a diet of “ culture, alienation, boredom and despair”. If ever there was a band built to weather the storm of a pandemic and lockdown, it’s Manic Street Preachers.
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