‘Critical Thinking’, the 15th studio album from alt-rock luminaries Manic Street Preachers, celebrates conflicting ideas colliding, with unflinchingly soul-searching lyrics meeting some of the most head-on, addictive melodies the band have ever recorded.

Bassist/lyricist Nicky Wire 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) 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.”