“I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror.” The words of JG Ballard, rising out of the churning depths of Mausoleum, are an unimprovable summary of Manic Street Preachers’ 1994 masterpiece The Holy Bible, which is one of that decade’s essential artistic statements in any medium. The work of four young men who accepted no ceiling on what a rock album could do, it’s an unblinking, self-implicating moral audit of humanity’s worst impulses, with guitar solos.

It was driven most fiercely by chief lyricist Richey Edwards, who disappeared in February 1995. Saluted tonight, by bassist Nicky Wire, as an “esoteric genius”, Edwards was deeply troubled but refused to privilege his own suffering, instead examining the bigger picture with a merciless discipline mirrored by his bandmates’ music. Like few other records – the Sex Pistols’ Bodies, perhaps, or Scott Walker’s Tilt – The Holy Bible leaves the listener feeling soiled, traumatised and accused, with no safe place to stand. The key line comes at the end of Of Walking Abortion: “Who’s responsible? You fucking are!”

Obviously the task of revisiting this terrain is not to be undertaken lightly. After Edwards’s disappearance, the surviving trio pivoted and unexpectedly became one of Britain’s biggest bands. Their career has been patchy but never complacent, and this year’s excellent Futurology album has earned them the right to mark the 20th anniversary of their last shows with Edwards by performing an album that is too thorny for mere nostalgia. This brief tour feels neither lazy nor exploitative but a serious, even necessary, reckoning with the past.

The Manics have revived 1994’s Apocalypse Now aesthetic. Wire, frontman James Dean Bradfield and drummer Sean Moore wear motley army surplus gear on a stage draped with camouflage netting. The sound is hard and clean; the rhythm section is cold and metallic; Bradfield’s contorted guitar solos are like yowls of distress. The singer apologises for his bug-stricken voice but it carries him through the gruellingly prolix verses, and the crowd roar the choruses when he occasionally falters.

This performance proves that The Holy Bible is more diverse and pleasurable than its oppressive reputation suggests. PCP and Revol are helter-skelter punk rockers, albeit ones concerned with liberal censorship and the sexual peccadilloes of tyrants. She Is Suffering and This Is Yesterday anticipate the grace and compassion of the post-Edwards years. Yes and Of Walking Abortion are poisoned anthems, halfway between the arena and the abyss. Faster, during which searchlights strafe the crowd and the stage glows a hellish crimson, is as terrifying as it is exhilarating, a militant howl of intermingled self-justification and self-disgust.

During the album’s in extremis moments, however, you can feel the walls closing in. The troubling, Foucault-inspired Archives of Pain has the density of heavy metal and the slashing severity of post-punk. The anorexic’s confession, 4st 7lbs, subsides into a terrible, deathly beauty. On The Intense Humming of Evil, directly inspired by the band’s visit to Dachau, the trio sound paralysed by incomprehensible horror that they can only express in comfortless noise. Hunched over their instruments, faces in shadow, they seem to be tunnelling their way into the song and never reaching the bottom. For the listener, it feels like being entombed. “You don’t get records like that on the radio any more, do you?” says Wire, breaking the tension.

You could imagine a gig that sustained this claustrophobic potency with more material from the Holy Bible period, but the band have mercifully chosen to make the second half a more genial blend of old hits and Futurology material. They change costumes and expand to their five-man touring line-up. This is the band the Manics became after Edwards vanished: more humane and forgiving, anchored by ideas of solidarity and community. This two-part show dramatises that transition and closes with 1996’s magnificent turning-point single, A Design for Life, before which Bradfield strums a few bars of Wham!’s Last Christmas.

If the coexistence of Last Christmas and The Intense Humming of Evil feels dissonant, then it is no more so than it was in 1994, when Bradfield first covered the Wham! song. Even then, with a punishing new album and a band member in extreme distress, Manic Street Preachers aspired to entertain. This emotionally complex evening confirms that their talent for communal jubilation is as representative as their capacity for scarifying intensity, and easier to inhabit in the long run. You can venture into the abyss but you can’t live there.