Know Your Enemy 20 scheduled for 2021 release

[VCK]

Like people have said there's an album in there somewhere - Found That Soul and Intravenous Agnostic are both brilliant and, controversial as this may be, but Wattsville Blues and Miss Europa Disco Dancer are two of the better songs on it. The problem is, there's no cohesive flow to it. Half the songs just seem lazily written and I've never been quite sure what they were setting out to achieve when they wrote the album. Were they wanting to do something a bit more raw than TIMTTMY and EMG, were they wanting to still do something poppy, or were they wanting to just do what they want and subvert people's expectations of them?

It's really odd how their career took quite a nosedive when this album came out, when Oasis have put out some albums that were even more critically panned and the general consenus was that they too were past their best at the turn of the millennium, yet they were still headlining festivals and selling out arenas and stadiums towards the end of their tenure. The Manics went from headlining Glastonbury to accepting support slots at festivals within the space of a few years.

But then the Manics' rejuvenation with SATT and then JFPL (there was quite a lot of hype surrounding the band around 2007-09) was stopped dead in its tracks with the awful PFAYM. I think that album did as much damage as KYE did.