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Listen: Manic Street Preachers release political single Orwellian ahead of new album The Ultra Vivid Lament

The new album will arrive in September.

Manic Street Preachers

Carla Speight / Getty

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Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers have announced a new studio album entitled The Ultra Vivid Lament, set to arrive on 3 September 2021. Ahead of the release, the band have dropped its first single Orwellian, alongside an official lyric video.

Orwellian’s lyrics discuss the changing ways debate takes place in the current year, with singer James Dean Bradfield lamenting that “We live in Orwellian times / It feels impossible to pick a side” and “Everywhere you look, everywhere you turn / The futurе fights the past, the books begin to burn.

In a statement about the release, the band stated that Orwellian is “about the battle to claim meaning, the erasing of context within debate, the overriding sense of factional conflict driven by digital platforms leading to a perpetual state of culture war.

“As with many songs on the record, it was written on the piano by James Dean Bradfield. Musically, it echoes ABBA, the majesty of Alan Rankine’s playing in the Associates and Talk Talk’s It’s My Life with a Lindsey Buckingham guitar solo. It felt like the perfect sonic and lyrical introduction to The Ultra Vivid Lament

Manic Street Preachers’ last album, Resistance Is Futile, was released in 2018. It was their thirteenth album overall.

You can hear Orwellian below.

The Ultra Vivid Lament will be released on 3 September 2021 on all standard formats plus 12-inch picture disc, and can be preordered here.

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