The Manics posted the following message on their official website: All thirteen songs on the new record feature lyrics left to us by Richey. The brilliance and intelligence of the lyrics dictated that we had to finally use them. Topics include
The Grande Odalisque by
Ingres,
Marlon Brando,
Giant Haystacks,
celebrity,
consumerism and
dysmorphia; all reiterating the genius and intellect of Richard James Edwards. Wire, the band's de facto lyricist, had begun contributing musically to the songwriting process on the album, stating "I did write quite a bit of music. [...] I wrote all of 'William's Last Words', I wrote pretty much all of 'Marlon JD', I wrote the chorus for '
Peeled Apples', the verse for 'She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach'". The lyrics are taken from a folder of songs,
haikus,
collages and drawings Edwards gave to bassist-lyricist
Nicky Wire a few weeks before he disappeared. Edwards also gave photocopies of the folder to singer-guitarist
James Dean Bradfield and drummer
Sean Moore. The band have described the
Rymans folder as having a picture of
Bugs Bunny drawn on the front emblazoned with the word '
opulence' in capital letters. In promotional interviews for the album, Bradfield and Wire have revealed that the folder contains around twenty-eight songs. Four of these appeared on the 1996 album
Everything Must Go: "Elvis Impersonator: Blackpool Pier", "
Kevin Carter", "Removables" and "Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky". Of the rest of the folder, Wire stated: There's probably between eight and ten maybe that were too impossible. Some of them are little haikus, four lines. "Dolphin-Friendly Tuna Wars", that's one; "Alien Orders/Invisible Armies", that's one [the band have recorded an instrumental that takes its title from this lyric]; "Young Men", which is quite
Joy Division. They just didn't feel right. We'll probably put them all out in a book one day. There's not gonna be a
Journal for Plague Lovers Two. The special version of the record does come with the original version of the tracks on there. So you can see the editing process, if there is any. The final track, "William's Last Words", has been compared to a
suicide note, and although Nicky Wire rejects this suggestion Bradfield observes, "you can draw some pretty obvious conclusions from the lyrics." Wire, who admitted finding the task of editing this song "pretty choking", Stylistically, the album features a
post-punk and
alternative rock sound reminiscent of
The Holy Bible. Cam Lindsay of
Exclaim! proclaimed the record to be a "relentlessly exploratory piece of
art rock". The album's opening track "
Peeled Apples" was played for the first time on
Zane Lowe's
BBC Radio 1 show on 25 March 2009. During an interview with Lowe, Wire said there would be no singles released from the album. However, "Jackie Collins Existential Question Time" was distributed to radio stations ahead of the album's release as a promotional 2-track CDR, which included the album version and a censored radio edit. A music video directed by
Douglas Hart was also produced, featuring the band performing in their then studio in front of the
Jenny Saville painting used on the album cover. The song was later included as a one-sided 7" single in the limited edition
National Treasures deluxe singles box set released in 2011. "Jackie Collins Existential Question Time" first aired on
XFM and
Kerrang! Radio on 30 March. It was also embedded on the band's official website. In 2020, an in-depth analysis of Edwards' lyrics on the album, by
Guy Mankowski (with input from Edwards' sister, Rachel) was published in the journal 'Punk & Post-Punk'. Mankowski concluded that 'in Edwards' lyrics, a number of metaphors reconfigure the malleability of the physical body and expand the concept of how self-fashioning can be applied in relation to it'. == Release ==