For their ninth album, the Manics engaged with what remains a complicated, saddening legacy, the disappearance of Richey Edwards, with an album that solely drew on some of his last lyrics written before that event. Journal for Plague Lovers contains a variety of acknowledgments back to their fraught early masterpiece The Holy Bible, including Jenny Saville cover art, though the musical feeling is less fragmentation and more processing fierce energy and emotion through often harrowing songs like “She Bathed Herself in a Bath of Bleach” and “William’s Last Words.”