Manic Street Preachers: “We’ve muzzled young generations – they get endlessly told off”

As Manic Street Preachers kick off their 2025 UK tour, check out part two of our interview with the band where they discuss politics, ’90s nostalgia, and how culture has “muzzled” the freedom of new generations of artists.

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Last week saw the band play the first date of their UK tour in Glasgow in support of their acclaimed 15th album ‘Critical Thinking’. Speaking to NME before the record’s release, bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire spoke of how there was “something about buying into a band and an aesthetic” of “timeless” acts like Oasis.

“People still search back in this age of instant everything to have that feeling of freedom that they represent of not giving a fuck,” he said. “It’s deeply admirable; that sense of ‘We are the greatest’. I get so bored with the sense of endless humility and, ‘Oh it’s such a privilege to be playing in front of you, I’m so humble to be doing this’. David Bowie never went on stage and said, ‘I’m so humbled to be here tonight’. That kind of attitude never existed when we were young.”

The bassist and lyricist said that he thought a certain meekness had arisen through a culture of constant judgment with no room for error.

“We’ve muzzled young generations,” he told NME. “They get endlessly told off. That sense of freedom has been kicked out of them, so you often retreat to these empty platitudes at times. There’s always someone kicking against the pricks and putting it out there.”

Pointing to a declining music industry and an overwhelming impetus on social media, the rock veteran said that young artists “have to do so much extra work while we were just allowed to focus on being in a band” and that “the amount of shadow work you have to do as an artist now is fucking unbelievable”.

“There’s not a shortage of good bands or bands with attitude; it’s just that cutting through is the hardest thing,” he explained. “It was much easier for us to cut through: music press, Radio One, Top Of The Pops – job done. Now the pressure is on. We have to let young people make mistakes and not endlessly judge them. The young generations need the space that we had to make so many fuck-ups. ”

Looking back to the ’90s when the Manics released their debut album ‘Generation Terrorists’ and later bothered the mainstream with the likes of ‘A Design For Life’ and ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next’ as a stadium indie act, frontman James Dean Bradfield looked upon it as a markedly different landscape.

“We come from quite an important era, and that means something to me,” he said. “It’s an era that people might not recognise now, and if I try to describe how much music ruled people’s lives – especially after 1995-1996.

“It’s nice to hear a big echo of it again. Oasis are the band who made the world sing. I was in a choir until I was 15 years old, so I like to hear people singing. They’re a band that transcend their own time.”

With the Manics going strong since 1986 without splitting or going on hiatus, Bradfield told NME that they felt like outliers from their era.

“We’ve always seen all these bands split up and get back together, split up and get back together and sometimes split up and get back together again!” he said. “We’re always slightly wry observers of that.

“Britpop was funny because we rode the wave of it, but we were around before it and never had anything against it. Some great songs came out of it and we enjoyed our time there. ‘The Holy Bible’ [1994], ‘Gold Against The Soul’ [1993] and ‘Generation Terrorists’  [1992] were not Britpop. We’ve lived through all these periods: Seattle, Britpop, the ‘00s, we’ve been there. The one thing I take away from it, especially these Oasis [reunion] shows, is that we came from a time when music just dominated the landscape.”

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A defining aspect of the Manics’ character that helped stand out among a wave of Britpop was their often glam-punk and military aesthetic and knack for blending art and literary references into their work alongside a fierce stance on politics. Looking at the state of the world today, Bradfield said that it was grim but ripe for young artists to be writing about.

“Our ability to eat ourselves alive…,” he noted about politics in 2025. “If there was one time when we didn’t need Trump to have a better playbook than Kamala Harris, it was now. He still outplayed them, and we can’t deny that. It’s upsetting that his playbook is better than the Democrats’, and it just shouldn’t happen. The stakes were too high. There’s enough material there for a generation to be getting on with, isn’t there?

“It’s upsetting to be where we are, but to realise that they were smarter – you’ve really got to do something about it. Especially after two terms of Obama. He was a politician, seasoned in Chicago. Chicago politicians are really hard-nosed bastards; it’s not a soft political scene there. He wasn’t the type of person that would always speak to the higher angels of our being. Sometimes he would be quite nasty, especially the second time around. There was a bit too much of that fake evangelical-ising from the Democrats this time: saying, ‘They go low, we go high’.

“You’ve got to fucking go to battle, and they didn’t go hard enough.”

Turning his attention to the UK, he urged caution over writing off Keir Starmer’s Labour government just yet.

“When the opposition is looking shaky enough to not have to put your foot to the pedal, that’s a valid way to govern,” he said. “Just keep going steady until you realise the opposition are ready to fight. Kemi Badenoch, if she’s looking at her internal polling numbers and those of the public, then they’re in a natural third position at the moment. If you’re Keir Starmer, you don’t have to worry about them for now, and can just see the lay of the land and get things done quietly.”

Ideas around digital hysteria and the rise of “tech bros” have been present in Manics’ songs for some years.

“Around ‘Postcards From A Young Man’ [2010], I did bore the shit out of people going on about songs like ‘A Billion Balconies Facing The Sun’ and ‘Don’t Be Evil’,” Wire told NME. “[‘Don’t Be Evil’] was the famous Google quote that they’d have in their offices!”

Speaking of how this shaped the lyrics of the title track ‘Critical Thinking’, he continued: “All the endless corporate platitudes that go with all these things: smart metres, smart water, smart motorways – this idea of putting ‘smart’ in front of anything suddenly elevating it to being really clever is just fucking insane! What the fuck are you saying to me?”

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Asked if he felt like something of a Nostradamus with Elon Musk becoming one of the most powerful men on the planet and wielding so much power in the White House, Wire replied: “Indeed. That incredible thing where Steve Banon – one of the worst people in the world – said: ‘I’m going to take down Elon Musk’… I can’t be on Steve Banon’s side, but what he was saying was quite good. How have we reached that point? When truth has become so fallible, it’s pretty impossible…”

As for the band’s own politics, Wire preached nuance in the face of absolutes – especially when the comes to the context of their lyrics.

“If you look at a lyric like ‘Archives Of Pain’ [from ‘The Holy Bible’] for instance, I didn’t write a single word for it and when Richey [Edwards, missing co-lyricist and guitarist] showed me it, I thought it was an absolute masterpiece. It was intellectual brilliance, but it does say ‘sterilise rapists’ and is almost a pro-death penalty song. If you break the lyrics down and put them on Twitter, then it could go down badly! But it’s not that; it’s an amazing dissection of concepts of punishment. ‘There is never redemption, any fool can regret yesterday’. What a fucking line. ‘Nail it to the House Of Lords, you will be buried in the same box as a killer’.

“Stuff like that, ‘P.C.P’ and even [new album title track] ‘Critical Thinking’, if you put it down as a series of tweets, it would probably look quite harsh. We were lucky enough to grow up in the age of a totally different era.”

‘Critical Thinking’ is out now, with the Manics currently on tour throughout the UK. Visit here for tickets and more information. 

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