ALBUM REVIEWS
Nicky Wire is mad as hell – and he ain’t gonna take it anymore. “It’s OK to not be OK / Live your best life / Be kind / Have some empathy / Speak truth to power…” No, it’s not an update on Baz Luhrman’s ‘Everybody’s Free’, but a snarky diatribe – set to a stomping PiL battle march – spitting back at the false empathy in social media’s conveyor belt of empty platitudes, leading us to “an aesthetic so bland” and “a cul-de-sac of a non-descript nowhere land”. PARKLIFE!…Nope.
The opening title track of Manic Street Preachers’ 15th album ‘Critical Thinking’ finds the motor-mouthed, sabre-rattling bassist and lyricist Wire aghast and rudderless in a fractured world. The storied, once sloganeering generation terrorists and NME Godlike Genius alumni who barked “You love us” and “I am an arch-i-tect” have come to realise there’s no absolute design for life, but that’s no reason to give up the fight on one of their own. Take ‘Decline & Fall’ – a slab of textbook ‘Everything Must Go‘-sized bittersweet euphoria where frontman James Dean Bradfield sings for the tiny victories won in a waning world: “Society used to be my worst enemy, now I want to build a small one for you and me”.
‘Hiding In Plain Sight’ is another Wire-fronted gem, with analogue-feel ‘80s indie to heighten his reckoning with the man in the mirror: “I wanna be in love with the man I used to be, in a decade I felt free”. ‘Dear Stephen’, meanwhile, sees Bradfield conjure the fretwork of Johnny Marr and sing of Wire’s forever-delayed reply to a postcard he once received from Morrissey when he couldn’t make a Smiths gig as a teen. He longs for the more pure connection he once felt with the controversial quiff-Grinch in his adolescence as he paraphrases the man himself: “It’s so easy to hate, it takes guts to be kind”.
Hope shot through yearning and doubt ring out on the early R.E.M.-indebted nostalgia anthem ‘Brush Strokes Of Reunion’ and the celebration of pure truth in nature on ‘People Ruin Paintings’. Elsewhere, the Bradfield-penned ‘Being Baptised’ more explicitly finds answers among Wire’s questioning: “I can walk in the room and bring the sunshine with me, bring the darkness down on this town.”
Sonically, ‘Critical Thinking’ has touches of the European modernist propulsion of 2014 renaissance record ‘Futurology’ and the graceful ABBA pop flourishes of 2021 predecessor ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’. But its uplifting warmth met with provocative spikiness feels like an album written staring up at the posters of their teenage art-pop and indie heroes – meant for the crackle of a record or the buzz of a cassette. In that comfort, they find the ammo to protest how only the Manics can: “A single bird sings a sweet old song / A fitting sound for a world so wrong”, as they put it on ‘Late Day Peaks’.
Book-ended with another Wire rallying cry in the aptly-named ‘OneManMilitia’, ‘Critical Thinking’ ends with the acceptance that “I don’t know what I am for, but I know I am against”. Met with the void, the Manics battle on to fill it with beauty and rage.
ALBUM REVIEWS
The leather jackets and skinny jeans worn by Noah Dillon and Chandler Ransom Lucy have become something of a signature, and the pair have hovered around the edges of the pop worlds in New York and Los Angeles for quite some time. First highlighted by NME during the Dimes Square resurgence in 2023, The Hellp have gradually stepped away from their earlier indie-sleaze imitation and leaned into something far more thoughtful. Their wild, neon-tinged party vibe has been traded for a more cinematic electronic approach that still holds onto a confident, self-aware attitude.
Dillon and Lucy started releasing music as The Hellp in 2016, with early mixtapes rooted in the chaotic nights and carefree behaviour once associated with NYC’s indie-sleaze staples like LCD Soundsystem and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Over time, though, they’ve earned a steadily growing respect from critics. That rise has come through both their underground gigs, which have included a show at London’s Corsica Studios with Fakemink as support, and through Dillon’s expanding visual work that recently reached Rosalía’s ‘LUX’ album and a pair of music videos for 2hollis.
As ‘Riviera’ approached release, the duo shared: “We knew our next project would need to be a bit more mature… we refuse to become stagnant. ‘Riviera’ is more solemn, restrained and impassioned than anything we’ve done before.” The finished album feels like Dillon and Lucy carefully balancing identity and openness, theatricality and direct emotion.
The lead release, ‘Country Road’, carries a late-night heaviness, the kind of confession you would quietly tell a friend in a club’s smoking area. Its lonely tone is surrounded by glitching electronics and a rising bridge that points to the exhaustion that follows endless nights out. Tracks like ‘New Wave America’ and ‘Cortt’ deepen what the duo mention in their liner notes as a “desperate story of the disparate Americana.” Both pieces broaden the album’s emotional landscape and offer clear-eyed commentary on reluctantly stepping into adulthood.
When ‘Riviera’ shifts into ‘Doppler’, the tone brightens for a moment as hopeful synths lift Dillon’s words about yearning and heartbreak into an emotional peak. And in the final moments of the record, The Hellp land on something instantly familiar to anyone who has drifted away from the club scene. The Kavinsky-like opening of ‘Here I Am’ nods to their early inspirations, while the closing track ‘Live Forever’ arrives with a slow, grounded maturity, built around Dillon repeating the line: “I don’t want to live forever.”
‘Riviera’ holds far less disorder than The Hellp’s earlier releases. This turn inward marks an important risk for a duo once fuelled by the momentum of a downtown New York comeback. By easing off the frenzy, The Hellp have stepped out of the party’s lingering haze and returned with a style that feels more refined and more aware of itself than anything they have created before.
