And this is where Know Your Enemy (2001) comes in to play. This album is the eccentric and untameable child of Manic Street Preachers’ records. Yet it conveys almost all of the above mentioned musical and lyrical directions into one digestible format. One could even argue that a song like “The Convalescent” packs more pop culture figures and references than the entire Manics back catalogue. What song has the gall to place middle distance runner Steve Ovett and golfer Payne Stewart alongside Pablo Picasso and Werner Herzog? When the band were out promoting Know Your Enemy in the various music magazines, they talked it up as the most extreme and rabble-rousing record of their career. This would have been a fair assessment if only they had stuck by it. Yet when asked by Noisey to rank his own records a few years later, James Dean Bradfield put it second from bottom (above 2004’s Lifeblood) as his least favorite. It often appears hovering in the final numbers of most fan-made lists as well.

But why?

The reasons for this negative consensus towards Know Your Enemy are varied, but if we took a quick glance, the musical styles of the record are certainly diverse yet also incoherent with no previous pointers, no set pattern or path to guide the listener though. We get straight-up punk rock with songs like “Dead Martyrs” and “Intravenous Agnostic,” melancholic anthems like “Let Robeson Sing,” breezy west coast rock signified by “So Why So Sad” and “Year of Purification,” and of course the disco song “Miss Europa Disco Dancer,” and some slumbering blues in the aptly titled “Wattsville Blues.”

The politics of Know Your Enemy is also messy, the band seemed to want to revive the vibrant mood and social/cultural protest of Generation Terrorists and The Holy Bible, but the idealism of youth was now absent. The band launched the record in the communist hotbed of Havana, Cuba, dangerously flirting with the Castro regime and bloody revolutions. It was a bold move, yet also one they took a lot of heat for in the home press, especially as documentaries and photos emerged of the band shaking hands with Fidel Castro.

This leads to another point. The band members were indeed older; their reintegrated political idealism came across as stubborn and grouchy in interviews from around this era. Yet, despite all of this, I believe that Know Your Enemy holds more relevance and significance than fans, and even the band themselves, give it credit for. It was a brilliant, defiant statement against the boring and non-political atmosphere of music at this point in time.

Another point to make is that the record is also as raw as the Manic Street Preachers had been in a long while. Not since their earliest Blackwood demos of the late 1980s recorded in Bradfield’s parents’ living room, or the scratchy bombast of “Motown Junk” and “You Love Us” from the Heavenly Records era, have we had such a potent, instinctive and unrefined version of the band. After the polished sheen of Everything Must Go and This is My Truth… it was shocking, yet also exhilarating to hear the band impose a new set of rules upon themselves and endeavor to accomplish something entirely different to the band’s past recordings. There is spontaneity and fuzzy rawness to the recordings of “Intravenous Agnostic” and “My Guernica” for example that signify the loose nature of the band’s approach to making Know Your Enemy.