The Holy Bible is the third studio album by Welsh alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers, released on 30 August 1994 by Epic Records.

While the album was being written and recorded, lyricist and rhythm guitarist Richey Edwards was struggling with severe depression, alcohol abuse, self-harm and anorexia nervosa, and its contents are considered by many sources to reflect his mental state.

[6] However, on later inspection of his notebooks, Wire was surprised to find he had contributed more lyrics than he had previously remembered, having also written portions of "Of Walking Abortion" and "Mausoleum" and some lines from "Faster".

[17][18] The album's lyrics deal with subjects including prostitution, American consumerism, British imperialism, freedom of speech, the Holocaust, self-starvation, serial killers, the death penalty, political revolution, childhood, fascism and suicide.

[6] Critic Simon Price notes that the potential radio-friendliness of the song is undermined by its focus on the subject of prostitution and the recurrence of sexual swearing in the lyric.

[23] Interviewed at the time of the album's release, Nicky Wire said that the track "Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayit'sworldwouldfallapart" was "not a completely anti-American song", but instead was about "how the most empty culture in the world can dominate in such a total sense".

[43] James Dean Bradfield has described the album as representing "the most definitive period for us visually as well as the songs we were writing and the record [...] we've never been scared to admit that".

[6] While touring in early 1994, the band visited army surplus stores and bought clothing to wear on stage, in an homage to The Clash.

[44] A performance of "Faster" on the BBC's Top of the Pops in June 1994 resulted in a record number of complaints—over 25,000—due to Bradfield wearing a paramilitary-style balaclava.

[45] The album cover, designed by Richey Edwards while hospitalised,[46] features a triptych by Jenny Saville depicting three perspectives on the body of an obese woman in her underwear, and is titled Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face).

The back cover features a photo of the band in military uniforms and a quote taken from Octave Mirbeau's book The Torture Garden.

[49] During April and May, when the band played concerts in Thailand and Portugal, Edwards was habitually cutting himself and appeared onstage in Bangkok with self-inflicted wounds across his chest.

[53] By the time of the album's release in late August 1994, the band played as a trio at the Reading Festival while Edwards was hospitalised at the private Priory Hospital in Roehampton.

[57] The Holy Bible has been described by Q as a "graphic, violent torrent of self-lacerating punk fury which infamously details the horrors in Richey Edwards' head".

[4] Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger once said: "Writing about The Holy Bible without somehow addressing the vanishing of Richey Edwards would be pointless: you would only be tracing his outline as you gradually and gingerly tiptoed around it.

Despite not charting in mainland Europe, and not selling very well initially, The Holy Bible received widespread acclaim from music critics upon release.

[63] Melody Maker, which regarded the album as primarily the work of Richey Edwards, described it as "the sound of a group in extremis [...] hurtling towards a private armageddon".

[71] Observed Roy Wilkinson in Select: "Amid all the references to coma, carcasses, 'walking abortions' and dying in the summer sits the spectre of Richey, holed up in a private clinic, having drunk too much, eaten too little and cut himself for reasons varying between dramatic gesture, a surrogate for screaming out loud and something 'sexual' [...] Let's hope that, with a record of such unsettling, morbid resonance as The Holy Bible, no further gestures are required.

"[67] In a retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic gave The Holy Bible four and a half stars out of five and called it "Richey James' last will and testament."

Although the music itself isn't as scarily intense, its tight, terse hard rock and glam hooks accentuate the paranoia behind the songs, making the lyrics cut deeper.

[37] Joe Tangari of Pitchfork wrote, "In a way, the story of Edwards' spiral into some unknown oblivion is tied to the experience of The Holy Bible, which in retrospect has become a sort of horror-show eulogy for a man who couldn't live with the world around him.

"[64] David Fricke of Rolling Stone wrote that "even the pall of [Edwards'] absence can't cancel out the life-affirming force that hits you with the very first song".

[66] Mark Edwards of Stylus Magazine opined that "The Holy Bible is easily one of the best albums of the 90s—ignored by many, but loved intensely by the few who've lived with it over the years [...] It puts everything the Manics have done since to shame, not to mention nearly everything else [in music]".

[38] Nick Butler of Sputnikmusic dubbed it a "classic" and concluded, "Punk, hard rock, indie, and even metal fans owe it to themselves to hear this.

[47] In December, three nights at the London Astoria ended with the band smashing up their equipment and the venue's lighting rig, causing £26,000 worth of damage.

[77] In late 2014 the band performed the album in full for the first time, at concerts in Glasgow, Manchester, Dublin and London, marking the 20th anniversary of its release.

[78] Following the UK concerts, the Manics took The Holy Bible tour to North America, and in April 2015 the band played in Washington DC, Toronto, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago.

[85] Ben Patashnik of Drowned in Sound later said that, at the time of its release, the album "didn't sell very well, but its impact was felt keenly by anyone who'd ever come into contact with the Manics", and that it is now a "masterpiece [...] the sound of one man in a close-knit group of friends slowly disintegrating and using his own anguish to create some of the most brilliant art to be released on a large scale as music in years [...] It's not a suicide note; it's a warning.

[87] A 2017 collection by Repeater Books, entitled "Triptych", "consider(s) The Holy Bible from three separate, intersecting angles, combining the personal with the political, history with memory, and popular accessibility with intellectual attention to the album’s depth and complexity.