Songfacts®:

• Manic Street Preachers started writing their 14th studio album, The Ultra Vivid Lament, in late 2019. "The Secret He Had Missed" was the first song James Dean Bradfield wrote for the record. The Manic's vocalist told HMV as soon as he penned it, he knew he would treat the album like "The Clash playing Abba." Bradfield added: "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."
• Bassist Nicky Wire's lyrics tell the story of the sibling Welsh artists Augustus John and Gwen John, and how opposite their lives were.
• A talented draughtsman and portrait painter, in the early 20th century Augustus John was considered the most important artist at work in Britain. But critics claim that after the First World War, his powers diminished and his work degenerated into pretentious showmanship.
  
  A Catholic convert, Gwen John lived in France for most of her life and many of her paintings depict the Dominican nuns of a French convent. She was the lover of French sculptor Auguste Rodin.
  
  Nicky Wire told NME: "Augustus John was bohemian, reckless, amazingly talented but some might say wasted his talent. Then Gwen John was much more about the interior world, living an almost nun-like existence in France with very little possessions. It just goes to show how different it can turn out between a brother and sister."
• During the song, Bradfield duets with Julia Cumming of the New York band Sunflower Bean. Wire told NME the collaboration came from being a fan of Cumming's restrained singing on Sunflower Bean's Twentytwo In Blue, which he compared to Abba vocalists Agnetha Fältskog and Frida Lyngstad. "Twentytwo In Blue is just one of my favorite records of all time," he told NME. "We were looking for something with no histrionics. We get really tired of singers just going up and down scales and showing off in the modern era. The genius of Abba is how the vocals are always so controlled, they're never over the top."
  
  "Julia can do that easily anyway," Wire added. "She's always really controlled and within herself. Once she got the Abba thing and the Billy Joel pianos she really enjoyed it and just breathed through it. She's an unbelievably underrated talent."
• The Ultra Vivid Lament is the second consecutive Manics album to feature a duet about an artistic male and female duo. Resistance Is Futile includes "Dylan & Caitlin," about Dylan Thomas and Caitlin Thomas (nee McNamara). Coincidentally, they were first introduced to one another by Augustus John.
• Longtime Manics collaborator Kieran Evans directed the video. It stars the Welsh actress Aimee-Ffion Edwards of Peaky Blinders, Skins and The Detectorists fame.
• The Ultra Vivid Lament was the first Manic Street Preachers album initially conceived on piano rather than guitar.
• The Ultra Vivid Lament topped the UK albums chart, the first Manic longplayer to reach #1 since This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours in 1998. Both times, the Welsh band battled Steps for the top spot:
  
  In 1998, the pop group's Step One landed in second place behind This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours.
  
  In 2021, Steps' What The Future Holds Pt 2 was runner-up to The Ultra Vivid Lament.