The Ultra Vivid Lament is the fourteenth studio album by Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers, released on 10 September 2021 by Columbia Records.

Preceded by two supporting singles, "Orwellian" and "The Secret He Had Missed", the album features contributions from Julia Cumming and Mark Lanegan. It was received well by critics, and debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart.

The album represents a departure from their 2018 effort Resistance Is Futile. The album announcement made clear that the new record would avoid tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, with Bradfield clearly stating that doing that would just "add insult to injury". Furthermore, about writing in lockdown, James said: "The escape was literally checking to see that the world around you wasn't crumbling when you wrote a song. Lockdown had the element of a waking dream for a lot of people, especially the first one last year. Writing music was a way of pinching myself to say, 'There's still a part of life that works in the same way that it did, albeit in a strange way'". Wire shared that he coped well with this issue: "I'm a very patient and lonely person," he admits. "I can deal with isolation and have always embraced utter boredom quite easily. You see the tragedy and agony unfolding around you and it feels a bit glib to say something like that".

Another event that affected the process of making the album was the death of both of Wire's parents. Having been sick during the making of Resistance Is Futile, his father died in the summer after its release. Wire said: "Having the parents that I had is probably the greatest thing that ever happened in my life. I really liked them; I didn't just love them. I liked talking to them, I'd speak to them every day. They were highly engaged, important, funny people." He credited them with his best traits: "Rage from my dad, he was a mental and physical force. And from my mum, kindness and femininity, an appreciation of aesthetic and the bliss of just sitting down and watching TV together".

While Bradfield learned to play piano during the lockdown, Wire's approach to the lyrical side changed, becoming more introspective and personal: "The lockdown pushed me into facing my own horrors, rather than the horrors outside." The songs that emerged from those sessions, which make up the album "are internal galaxies, of exploration within myself. I think they're the most personal lyrics I've ever written." Also having to confront the loss of his parents, it "allowed me to go deep into myself", the loss "overhung the lyrics". Musically, Wire stated: "I think it's got traces of Lifeblood and Futurology, but I think it is a step into a new dimension. It's got the high modernism of Futurology and the underplayed, glacial power of Lifeblood. It's very much framed within ABBA's 'Waterloo' and Echo & the Bunnymen's 'Bring On the Dancing Horses'." He concluded: "I'm not going to pretend that we're reinventing the wheel in terms of modernity, but it's definitely framed within that era of time."

The band revealed that there were not many songs to pick from for the new record. Wire reflected: "If it didn't feel like it could be on the album, we were either dumping it or stowing it away so there's three or four. There's one James wrote called 'Eternalised' that he didn't think was up to the mark. The two extra tracks on the Japanese version of the album are really good actually. 'My Drowning World' in particular. There's one I wrote called 'Time of Reckoning' which didn't make the cut either. But we weren't writing masses and masses". Bradfield shared: "I knew I wanted to treat it like The Clash playing Abba. When something like that happens naturally, you have to latch on to it. There was no mission statement, no M.O. You get a clue that pulls you in the right direction. Nick had a couple more lyrics and he gave them to me and the ball started rolling. When you get an undercurrent that you know is going to drag you somewhere, somewhere you know could be very exciting, that's when you start." He said that the choice of title was easy: "I didn't know what the title was going to be until the second day of Rockfield, that's when Nick first mentioned it. I connected with it straight away, he showed me the artwork, I loved the figure staring out at the sea. It reminded me of The Truman Show nature of lockdown and what that was. Being trapped in this beautiful world, you couldn't touch, or couldn't stay for too long".

Wire summed up the process of making the album: "Everything has been chipped away at, but ourselves and by outside factors. With this album we looked at each other and realised that the only thing we've got left, the essence of the band, is creativity. It's the last thing that binds us together. We thought let's make the most of that. Let's cherish it".

The Ultra Vivid Lament was released on 10 September 2021 in standard CD format, deluxe CD, cassette and vinyl. The album managed to sell around 27,000 copies in its first week, entering at number one in the UK Albums Chart, it spent four weeks in the top 100 and it was the band's second number one album in the United Kingdom after 1998's This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours. The album also reached number one on the Official Vinyl Albums Chart, and number two on the Official Record Store Chart.