Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers has just released surprise solo album Intimism

In a surprise drop on SoundCloud, earlier this year, Wire unveiled "Contact Sheets" which marked his first solo release in almost two decades. Today, he returns with the full album, uploaded to BandCamp.

Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield previously revealed that Wire had been recording his new LP while the singer was at work on his own previous solo album, Even In Exile.

“I’d have our studio one day, he’d have it the next, he asked me to play a guitar solo on one of his tracks, and yeah – his stuff is sounding great,” Bradfield told NME. “There was one song on there that was fucking amazing but hard to describe. It was very modern, very electronic, and very soothsaying and prophetic.

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Recorded at Door to the River Studios and Faster Studios Wales, Initimism was produced by Loz Williams and Nicky Wire, who wrote and recorded all of the music.

“This record is a collage pieced together over the last decade,” Wire says. “It’s as me as me can be – a distillation of my purest indie fantasies, a place where all those broken lists of regret have found themselves realigned. I found a musical and lyrical language I could call my own. A landscape of mundane miracles, interior monologues and lacerating self loathing."

Wire released his debut solo debut I Killed The Zeitgeist in 2006.