January 30, 2023 by Flint
The near future has been and gone
Well, here’s the political statement we all wanted to hear from the Manics after the – quite frankly – insane half-decade that the UK has had. But it’s not a rage against the institution, a nihilistic call to arms or a song fighting for a cause. It’s the final salute to the broken horizon as the ship slowly sinks underneath your feet.
The Ultra Vivid Lament isn’t really a COVID album but the weight of the pandemic did affect the album and its writers as well: the title of the record is Wire’s summary of the more intense lockdown periods and how the loneliness and anxiety of so many people became so tangible – vivid – when the world shut down. “Afterending” starts out as a description of the state the UK had found itself in the early 2020s. The European Union HQ in Brussels took down the UK flag as the split from the union was fully realised while civil liberties movements started to draw attention to less positive parts of UK’s history and initiated the removal (whether legal or illegal) of a number of statues dedicated to historic personnel who had risen to power through slave trade and colonial greed. As COVID restrictions became a reality, the daily news feeds were inundated with stories of conservative politicials breaking rules they had set without any repercussions, practically even flaunting their corruption with the dodgy PPE deals set by the government; the genuine im promptu, grassroots-organised act of people publically showing their gratitude to the National Health Service by clapping for them on their balconies and porches soon became taken over and co-opted as means of distraction by the same people who were actively trying to starve off NHS at the time of their biggest need. In just five lines Wire summarises everything going on around him and he doesn’t need to say anything else – the picture is vivid enough and it’s genuinely melancholy. After the first chorus the attention turns from the outside world to inside people’s homes, to the solitude that once felt like a resting place until it became enforced, and to the technology that once gave freedom but suddenly became the only means of communication – and doomscrolling.
Once upon a time this could have resulted in a fiery rant naming names and probably linking those names to dictators and despots from across history, but not in 2021. Everything is too much and given Wire’s open statements about his lack of belief in any major political powers anymore – i.e. most of this very album – he can’t see a way forward either. “Afterending” is a song of quiet and mournful acceptance – that there is no visible light at the end of the tunnel as “the near future has been and gone”. But you can at least find company in someone else during the end, and that’s comforting enough.
“Afterending” may as well be the title track – it is the ultra vivid lament of our times, and whether intentionally or not it brings the rest of the album together with nods to the previous songs. links in with the previous album. “Sail into the abyss with me” echoes the invite to walk together through the apocalypse in “Orwellian”, earlier on the band encouraged to not let the night divide us as we now “enter into a night of nothingness” – if you really want to stretch it then “painting portraits of our loneliness” could be wink towards the painter siblings of “The Secret He Had Missed” but it’s more realistically simply a phrase to describe the number of social media posts and memes elaborately describing the weird times people found themselves in. It brings the album to a rest not with a bang or even a sigh, but a kind of melancholy serenity. It puts in overt words what the rest of the album often only glances at, provides the context to everything that came before and thus appropriately closes the circle as the record ends. It’s the first time where a Manics album closer feels so overtly like a summary of what came before – even something like “Cardiff Afterlife”, which also tackled directly something the rest of the album was inspired by but avoided saying outright, didn’t feel like it quite closed the book as effectively in its themes as “Afterending” does.
Maybe the combination of that oddly calming acceptance and the summation of everything before it is what makes “Afterending” so powerful. My first listen of the album was through the headphones of the flat I lived back then, with my chair turned towards giant glass windows facing what used to be a busy motorway; and even as the worst lockdowns had ceased, that urban stretch was still like a ghost town compared to how it used to be. That scenery hit deep when “Afterending” played, and the song quickly established itself as a powerful moment that resonantly depicted where we were in a wider perspective, including mentally. The Manics themselves had been a powerful presence in my life for half my lifetime and while there had been peaks and valleys during those years, I had coincidentally found myself revisiting their works in the run up to the album and rekindled a familiar love with their body of work. “Afterending” and its tone, its deep sadness and almost defiant call for facing the non-existing future together, was – and still is – one of the very few times where I felt like this band who’d been such a lifeline for me were expressing themselves on the same wavelength I was going through on a personal, emotional level.
It’s just absolutely stunning, isn’t it? No grand solos, no bombastic gestures – even the sing-along towards the end feels like a gentle farewell with your established comrades in arms rather than anything that would invite a crowd together from scratch. But it’s gorgeously arranged, poignantly performed and is a downright perfect melody/lyric combo. It is everything the album has been working towards from an emotional perspective and puts it together with a musical language that’s a comfortable evolution of the band during their greatest introspective moments. And it’s personal, and beautifully so. An ultra vivid lament indeed.
Manic Street Preachers song-by-song 
