Most bands don’t get to their tenth album. Mercifully. By then, the youthful brio, the wit, the desire, the flair, the fun, the zeal and commitment have usually all evaporated to be replaced by self-loathing, disappointment and the sour taste of promise unfulfilled, or the deadening torpor of sanctified elder statesman status and the moth-eaten trappings that go with it; the Lifetime Achievement awards, the Rock and Roll Hall of fame, the box set that looks suspiciously like a coffin. Familiarity has bred contempt, old friends have become strangers, laurels are rested on and the hits of prehistory dusted off for the Greatest Hits tour, the divorce settlements, the tax bill.

Ten albums into their life’s work, it would be wrong to say that the Manic Street Preachers are raging against the dying of the light. Because the light has never burned brighter or with a fiercer clarity. ‘Postcards From A Young Man’ comes after the acclaimed ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’, a record of steely intent and corrosive power on which every lyric was taken from the final folder of work left by former member Richey Edwards just prior to his disappearance in 1995. That album in turn was a typically stark and startling follow-up to 2007s triumphantly resurgent ‘Send Away The Tigers’, an album that gave new heart to their global faithful and introduced the band to new countries, new audiences, new possibilities.

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