May 20th 1996, Everything Must Go by Manic Street Preachers was released.
One of my favourite albums of all time.
I was 26. Britpop was absolutely everywhere. Oasis vs Blur had basically become a full-contact national pastime by then. Every bloke in every pub suddenly had sideburns, an Adidas zip-up and the swagger of somebody who’d once stood near Camden Market.
For me it was mostly Pulp and Oasis.
Then along came this.
And it felt like somebody had opened the curtains after three years of indie lads shouting about cigarettes and birds.
Because Everything Must Go sounded enormous.
Sad. Defiant. Intelligent. Properly emotional without sounding like six students discussing poetry in a kitchen at 2am while somebody slowly murders Wonderwall on an acoustic guitar.
The backdrop to it all obviously gives the album this strange weight as well. This was the first Manics record after the disappearance of Richey Edwards. A band who’d always felt dangerous and confrontational suddenly sounded widescreen. Bigger somehow. Like grief had accidentally turned them into one of the best stadium bands Britain’s ever produced.
And the songs…
A Design For Life is still colossal. One of those records where the opening alone makes you instinctively want to stare moodily out of a rain-covered train window while questioning capitalism.
Everything Must Go somehow sounds uplifting and melancholy at exactly the same time.
Kevin Carter remains criminally underrated.
Australia is huge.
And No Surface All Feeling still quietly sneaks up years later and reminds you this band could do tenderness just as well as anger.
What I always loved about the Manics is they could reference art, politics, philosophy and existential despair… but still understood the important bit was writing actual songs people wanted to play again.
And musically it’s aged beautifully.
Rich production. Massive hooks. Strings everywhere. Actual ambition.
No pretending badly played guitars counted as authenticity.
At the height of Britpop, when a lot of bands were busy writing songs about birds, booze and being a bit lairy in Camden, the Manics delivered something human, bruised and genuinely lasting.
Still sounds phenomenal now.
Still one of the great British albums of the 1990s.
And still proof that sometimes the best music comes from people who look like they haven’t slept properly since 1992.
