Manic Street Preachers ahead of Sabrina Carpenter in race for this week’s UK Number One album 

Manic Street Preachers have moved ahead of Sabrina Carpenter in the race for the UK Number One album this week.

The Welsh group are making the sprint for the top of the charts with their recently released record ‘Critical Thinking’, which marks their 15th studio album and the follow-up to 2022’s ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’.

If they make the top spot by the end of the week, it will mark the Manics’ third chart-topping UK album. They first hit the milestone back in 1998 with their ‘This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours’, then did so again with their aforementioned 14th LP.

Hot on their heels for the milestone, however, is US pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter, whose massive summer album ‘Short N’ Sweet’ is back on the charts after a new deluxe edition arrived last week, and is currently sitting in second place. Just 2,700 units separate them, according to Official Charts.

The Wombats are currently in third place with ‘Oh! The Ocean’, which has become their fifth album to make the Top 10 in the UK, and fourth position is held by PARTYNEXTDOOR and Drake for their collaborative album ‘$ome $exy $ongs 4 U’. If it holds its place, the latter could signal the second Top 10 for PARTYNEXTDOOR, and the 14th Top 10 for the Canadian rapper.

Sabrina Carpenter performs on stage during the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards. CREDIT: Noam Galai/Getty Images

Last week, Manics’ latest album was given a glowing four-star review from NME, with Andrew Trendell describing the record as one that begins with “the motor-mouthed, sabre-rattling bassist and lyricist [Nicky] Wire aghast and rudderless in a fractured world”.

“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’,” it read. “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.

Around that time, the band’s own Nicky Wire and James Dean Bradfield spoke to NME about the inspiration for the new material, as well as how they are already developing plans for their “European” 16th album.

“The only thing I attack on this record is myself,” Wire said of ‘Critical Thinking’. “The moral judgement on this album is very much the mirror, maybe with the exception of ‘People Ruin Paintings’ which is a bit broader. ‘Critical Thinking’ the title track conveys a different kind of lyrical nastiness and is very much a warning to the self: the idea that the train is as important a muscle as any other.

“You have to go to the gym for the brain, which for me was just writing it all down and trying to come to some different perspectives,” he added. “I know it sounds really fucking nihilistic and narcissistic; it’s just the way it was. We don’t have time to really interrogate what kind of album we want to make or how we do it.”

Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers at Alexandra Palace Park on July 18, 2024. (Photo by Gus Stewart/Redferns)

As for Sabrina Carpenter, the singer is set to head to the UK next month for a run of live shows celebrating ‘Short N’ Sweet’.

She also recently won over countless fans for her appearance in the 50th-anniversary episode of Saturday Night Live. This included a star-studded sketch with Pedro Pascal and Bad Bunny, as well as a joint performance with Paul Simon, which saw them deliver a rendition of ‘Homeward Bound’.

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