Manic Street Preachers about "culture, alienation, boredom and despair" has gained them a loyal following and cult status. With their debut album, "Generation Terrorists", the Manic Street Preachers proclaimed it would be the "greatest rock album ever", as well as hoping to sell "sixteen million copies" around the world, after which they would split up. Despite the album's failure to meet this level of success, the band carried on with their career. The group became a trio after Richey Edwards disappeared in February 1995. The band went on to gain critical and commercial success in spite of his absence. Edwards was legally "presumed
Everything Must Go (Manic Street Preachers album) a hummable ditty." "Vox" magazine's Mark Sutherland saw "Everything Must Go" as the group's "most approachable" album, describing it as a "record so superb it might just make intelligence fashionable again", and surmising that the album "proves that, professionally, at least, the Manic Street Preachers don't miss Richey." "Rolling Stone" critic David Fricke called "Everything Must Go" the "most underrated album of the year", describing it as "a record of painstaking melodic craft and thundering execution, a proclamation of physical and emotional cleansing – up to a point." In a retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic wrote: "Above all,