Bloc Party are one of Britain’s most enduring but curious indie rock successes.

Their career bolted out of the gate with their era-defining 2005 debut album Silent Alarm. Earnest, emotional, frenetic – it helped shape the tone for a raft of guitar-driven groups that came in its wake, only for Bloc Party to jettison and expand from a sound they helped popularise.



From the prolific late ‘00s period that produced their next two albums, A Weekend In The City and Intimacy, to the line-up changes that resulted in 2016’s more subdued Hymns, they’ve incorporated more ambitious elements and electronic sounds in order to push forward.

The ups and downs of their career have been defined by experimenting in order to reach new audiences and creative territory, their ever-changing sound unified by frontman Kele Okereke.

Now, on the eve of Bloc Party returning to Australia next month to perform Silent Alarm in full, Kele joins us for an inside look back at what they’ve achieved, and what happens next.

The Inside Story of Bloc Party

Author: Al Newstead



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Whatsapp Bloc Party in 2005 (L-R: Matt Tong, Gordon Moakes, Kele Okereke, Russell Lissack)

Chapter 1: Silent Alarm



By the time Bloc Party released their debut album, in February 2005, the rock revival spearheaded by The Strokes, The White Stripes, and The Libertines was starting to turn.

Bands struggled to evolve their sound as waves of new imitators emerged; guitar groups were risking fatigue but with Silent Alarm, Bloc Party offered something unique from their contemporaries.

A band more serious than Franz Ferdinand, songs that veered into political territory Arctic Monkeys wouldn’t touch, with a lacerating energy and sound that outpaced Kaiser Chiefs, The Futureheads, and Maxïmo Park combined.

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Media buzz around Bloc Party’s 2004 EPs (May’s self-titled debut and December’s Little Thoughts) was glowing but dominated by references to Gang of Four (a group the band says they didn’t hear until after Silent Alarm) and the post-punk revival – a movement Bloc Party didn’t want to be lumped in with, and which frontman Kele Okereke didn’t identify.

“I personally didn’t understand because I wasn’t so into that kind of music,” he tells Double J’s Gemma Pike in 2018. Heading to Copenhagen in mid-2004, for a six-week stint at Delta Lab Studios to record their debut album with producer Paul Epworth, the band was keen to make something that couldn’t be typecast as “pale, grey and skinny” post-punk. To craft music with body, life, and a pulse.

“Making Silent Alarm, we were conscious we wanted to something that felt completely in technicolour. It wasn’t just this spiky, scratchy cool-sounding thing. It was important to show there was a sense of depth and roundness to the music that we wanted to make. That was the only gameplan really, that we knew we had to prove ourselves.”

The quartet drew inspiration from the music that bonded them growing up as ‘alternative kids’ in inner-London – American underground acts like Sonic Youth, Pavement; atmospheric post-rock by Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and the late-night club world where they’d congregate to dance and party.

“We wanted there to be dancefloor moments… That was a big part of what we were about, so we wanted there to be a nod or wink to the atmospherics and dynamics of dance and electronic music.”

Those seemingly disparate elements come together beautifully on Silent Alarm.

The album begins with Russell Lissack’s cascading washes of processed guitar, crafting space and atmosphere before drummer Matt Tong’s hissing hi-hats surge into a muscular pulse that just makes you want to move. Gordon Moakes’ inventive bassline unfurls itself late in the first verse, an understated but essential part of the track’s momentum.

‘Like Eating Glass’ is a call to arms, underscored by Okereke’s unmistakable vocals - his accented voice careening through the mix like an impassioned yelp, every phrase feeling like its punctuated with an exclamation mark (‘It’s so cold! In this! House!’).

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‘Like Eating Glass’ cleverly introduces you, one by one, to the elements that make Silent Alarm so infectious: the energy, rhythmic interplay, and explosive melodrama. But it’s far from a blueprint. The sweeping delicacy of ‘Blue Light’ and ‘So Here We Are’, the relatively downcast ‘Plans’ and atmospheric closer ‘Compliments’ – all showed the depth and colour Bloc Party were hoping would set them apart.

But as adept as the quartet were at extending their sound and dynamics while retaining their kinetic vitality, it’s when firing at full throttle that they produced some of their best loved songs.

Needling guitars and the nuclear vigour of the rhythm section combined to dramatic effect on the whiplashing ‘Helicopter’, shimmering ‘This Modern Love’, politically tense ‘Price of Gasoline’, the commanding repetition of ‘She’s Hearing Voices’ and, in Kele’s words, the “sinister but also quite sexy” ‘Banquet’.

“I wanted it to sound like Adam Ant… this dark insistent, semi-tribal, tom-heavy feel,” he says. “But then with the interlocking guitar work it took on another quality.”

Speaking about the guitar interaction that distinguishes so much of Silent Alarm, Okereke namechecks Television’s 1977 masterpiece Marquee Moon.

“It just seemed like such an obvious thing that no-one was really doing, that call-and-response playing.”

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Talking Heads was another influence – the starting point for ‘Positive Tension’. “I remember [Matt] playing me [‘Psycho Killer’] and thinking how cool and wiry it sounded. There was no fat on the track, it felt very lean and muscular. I loved how it worked.” Instead of singing about the nerves of a serial killer, like David Byrne, Okereke skewers reality TV competitions, like X Factor and American Idol, and the youthful naivety of its contestants deluded that ‘something glorious is about to happen’.

“I think it was just seeing that hopeful desperation. There’s something sinister about the way young people are preyed upon in those formats that you still see now,” Okereke reflects. “It seems wrong, because those kids will be chewed up and spat out before they can even realise what’s happened and that’s supposed to be our entertainment, that these people’s lives are ruined.”

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Reaching the business end of charts all over the world, and universal acclaim from critics by the end of 2005, Silent Alarm has been retrospectively canonised as one of the best albums of the ‘00s (NME, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Complex all agree).

Praised for its arresting urgency, bookish smarts, and revitalising an ailing genre with arty-punk you could dance to, Silent Alarm quickly saw Bloc Party hailed as the future saviours of indie rock.

Razor-sharp yet elegant, it more than achieved what they had set out to do – establish themselves as a band that couldn’t be easily pigeonholed by any one genre or movement.

“The objection was seeing that sort of stuff in print,” Okereke ponders. “It always feels like a reduction or a caricature of what it is you’re trying to do, so your natural instinct is to rebel against it and go against what people think or assume about you.”

“That is a pattern or trope that has continued with us as a band and me as a songwriter, I’m trying to constantly prove people wrong, that’s something that’s followed me throughout my career.”

Case in point: Bloc Party’s second album…

Chapter 2: A Weekend In The City

In 2007, music culture was fast shedding the tribal clashes and genre boundaries that defined the ‘90s rock scene but in the UK, fans and critics were still sceptical of any band that embraced electronics in to their sound who didn’t hail from New York City (or was called LCD Soundsystem). The idea of a group trading in guitars for synthesizers, or worse turntables, was fast becoming a clichéd red flag.

Perhaps seeing this as a challenge, Bloc Party took up the gauntlet, first making their allegiances obvious with the release of Silent Alarm Remixed – a song-for-song rework of their debut from cutting-edge producers and artists that underscored the dancefloor dynamics of their music (the Remixed tradition would continue for their next two albums).

It arguably telegraphed the drastic shifts in direction and new territory that Okereke, under the tutelage of producer Jacknife Lee, would steer Bloc Party for album number two, 2007’s A Weekend In The City.

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“I think A Weekend In The City was very much a reaction to Silent Alarm, or at least the success of Silent Alarm,” says Kele.

Extensive use of programmed beats, studio trickery, and a string section sought to distance Bloc Party from the conventional indie rock set-up and their debut. It’s also the album where Kele Okereke comes to the fore, his lyrics more personal, the themes more pronounced.

The record opens with ‘Clay (Disappear Here)’, and a line that could be a mission statement: ‘I am trying to be heroic in an age of modernity’, a pursuit the subsequent journey proves might be ultimately futile.

These are songs that take a stand against British media’s moral panic (‘Hunting For Witches’), racist immigration policies (‘Where Is Home?'), and critique the apathy of youth culture (‘Uniform’). But it also sympathises with the struggle for purpose and identity of a generation discontented by the unfulfilled promises of their parents, numbing the sadness and alienation by retreating to a blur of partying (‘The Prayer’), cocaine-induced euphoria (‘On’), failed sexual encounters (‘Kreuzberg’), and an idyllic weekend escape to Brighton that’s all-too-temporary (‘Waiting For The 7.18’).

The only sense of joy and love is nostalgic – lost to the halcyon days of high school crushes (‘I Still Remember’), the storyteller ultimately “sickened with the excesses of his own generation, yet unable to escape them,” as The Guardian wrote when they ranked A Weekend In The City among the 1000 Albums To Hear Before You Die.

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The album’s self-doubt and litany of excess drinking, drugs, and sleeping around was autobiographical. The international success of Silent Alarm thrust Kele Okereke, 26 at the time, into “minor celebrity” status and, at least initially, he was enjoying the benefits of his newfound fame.

“It’s quite a seductive feeling being able to walk straight into the club and not have to queue. People are excited to meet you, everyone’s excited to party [and] do drugs with you,” Okereke admits.

“It’s an exciting feeling to be in that position. It’s only afterwards that you start to question what’s actually happening. In that hangover/comedown moment you start to think ‘Maybe there’s more to life than this?’”

“There was a part of me that recoiled a little bit, psychically, at where I was going. That fear about what I was turning into definitely bled into what that album was about for me, this sense that maybe I was losing control of who I was.”

Aside from its sound and style, A Weekend In The City also subverted indie rock’s conservatism as a genre dominated by straight white dudes, simply because Kele Okereke wasn’t.

In a 2014 guest editorial for Thump, the frontman writes: “From 2004-2006, in every interview I was asked what it felt like to be a black musician making indie music-the subtext always being that this was not a genre for the likes of people like me.”

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For better or worse, Kele’s perspective as a gay man of colour was singled out for its scarcity in the British rock scene. The nasty catch? Though Okereke had come out to his conservative, Nigerian-born parents in 2001, it wasn’t until 2010 that he was comfortable to speak publicly about his sexuality.

The coded queerness of ‘I Still Remember’ and ‘Kreuzberg’ was ahead of its time, but it was very much a subtext rather than an overt celebration, Okereke’s identity was still not something up for media scrutiny.

“There was a dogged insistence for me to clarify my sexuality in the media, which culminated in Q, one the UK's biggest music magazines outing me,” Okereke wrote for Thump.

“We realized that the fans of music didn't seem to have a problem with the color of my skin or sexual orientation, it was rock journalists, always white male rock journalists that seemed to have an issue with it.”

Critics looking for negatives fixated on the band’s newfound bombast as an awkward fit and Okereke’s occasionally overstuffed lyrics and clunky delivery (‘At the Les Trois Garçons/We meet at precisely 9 o'clock/I order the foie gras/And I eat it with complete disdain’).

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Whatsapp Bloc Party circa 2012.

Chapter 3: Intimacy

A Weekend In The City also kickstarted a prolific period for the band – they’d written an album’s worth of extra material (known amongst bootleggers as Another Weekend In The City) and released the thumping synth-and-auto-tune propelled ‘Flux’ – a standalone single released in November 2007 that was retroactively added to A Weekend In The City’s tracklist.

Though it was a creatively fertile period where he began embracing his identity both personally and creatively, looking back, Okereke describes it as an “odd time” in Bloc Party’s history.

“That period was the start of things going wrong for us personally in the band. But it was very much the start of me realising my creative potential as a musician and a songwriter,” he tells Double J.

“That’s the point we started to diverge as people. My relationship with Jacknife Lee was part of that divergence. He very much encouraged me as the principal songwriter and musical force, to take my ideas as far as I could. Maybe there were times that meant I was moving away from the band. I don’t hold that against him, if anything... that's something that I will forever be grateful for."

“It was something that I very much took the lead on, it was something I enjoyed and that we took into Intimacy, our third album, and something that I carried on with my solo work.”

Intimacy, Bloc Party’s third album, came just seven months after A Weekend In The City, dropped with little advance warning in August 2008 as a lightning fast digital release (a move not dissimilar to Radiohead’s In Rainbows).

This fast turnaround meant Intimacy had little time to be judged by press before it reached fans – perhaps a cheap ploy if the music was bad, but in fact it was arguably Bloc Party’s most diverse and fascinating listen.

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Built from sessions produced by Silent Alarm’s Paul Epworth and Jacknife Lee, Intimacy embraced experimentalism and reconfigured the band’s tried-and-tested methods in daring ways.

For every track that crackled with recognisable vigour – ‘Halo’, ‘One Month Off’, ‘Trojan Horse’ – there’s another that completely deconstructs Bloc Party’s familiar methods.

‘Mercury’ sizzles with vicious horns, beats, and cut-up vocal pitches; fragmented drum and bass combine with an unsettling choir on ‘Zephyrus’; gloomy electro colours ‘Better Than Heaven’, and ‘Ares’ clatters around textured catch-cries and apocalyptic breakbeats (borrowing heavily from ‘Setting Sun’ by Kele’s future collaborators, Chemical Brothers).

The menacing atmospheres and explosive emotional shifts complimented Okereke’s ruminations on heartache (the majestic ‘Ion Square’), loss (‘Biko’), and death (‘Signs’). It’s an album that takes the road-less-travelled to reach cathartic climaxes.

Overflowing with ideas, occasionally to its detriment, Intimacy polarised their fanbase and divided critics – an increasing trend in the reception to new Bloc Party releases – who couldn’t agree whether it was a revolutionary work of art or an incoherent mess. But nearly all agreed it was audacious.

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A year after Intimacy, Kele released his debut solo album, The Boxer, which completely annexed guitars and rock aesthetics in favour of sounds built for the dancefloors and clubs Okereke was now frequenting as a DJ.

“I knew that this album couldn’t sound like it was a Bloc Party album, it had to live in a different space… I wanted to show something completely different that no-one had really seen before,” he says. “It was good for me because it meant I had to find a new way of solving everything, a new way to write and create.”

A follow-up EP, The Hunter was released in November 2011, sparking rumours that Kele’s electronic focus had led to him being fired from the band.

In fact, they were about to go back to the six-strings in a big way.

Chapter 4: Four

Recorded in New York, between the tail-end of 2011 and early 2012, Bloc Party’s fourth album was touted as a return to Silent Alarm-form. An idea perpetuated not only by the involvement of a new producer behind the decks – Alex Newport, who’d worked for At The Drive-In, The Mars Volta, and Death Cab For Cutie – but by Okereke himself.

In a May 2012 blog post announcing the completion of Four, he described it as the sound of “four people playing in a room”. In a 2012 Rolling Stone interview, he spoke of needing to “reclaim the process” and make “visceral and confrontational” music that cut back the overdubs and electronic tinkering in favour of a raw, lo-fi sound.

“We wanted to challenge ourselves by not relying on the invisible grid that seems to be mapping out all of popular music these days,” he wrote in an additional Pro-Tools diss.

He went as far as hailing the album as “the best thing” Bloc Party had ever done. It wasn’t.

“I was just craving the sound of something instant, direct and abrasive. That’s really what the electric guitar is best at. So that’s where Four came from,” Okereke tells Double J in 2018.

Once the thrill of the album sounding like their landmark debut passed, it became clear that the cranked-up guitars and jack-knifing riffs were covering for a lack of invention.

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Four certainly has its moments – the clipped, banjo-assisted ‘Real Talk’ and ‘Coliseum’, with its bluesy guitars giving way to hardcore crunch, are unlike anything else in the band’s catalogue. But as whole, the album retreads rather than recaptures their past glories.

The sinister ‘3 x 3’, and grunge riffage of ‘We Are Not Good People’ and ‘Kettling’ seem awkwardly out of character, and it’s telling that only ‘Octopus’ and ‘Team A’ have survived in the band’s modern-day setlists.

The unpredictability feels authentic but beneath the bluster Four is the sound of a band at the brink of exhausting themselves trying to reconnect with the ferocious impact of their earlier material and frustrated they can’t truly escape it.

In August 2013, The Nextwave Sessions EP (featuring ‘Ratchet’) dropped to a tepid reception. However, Kele’s growing apathy for rock music would lead to another electo-drenched solo album, 2014’s Trick, and drive the final wedge that would divide himself and guitarist Russell Lissack from bassist Gordon Moakes and drummer Matt Tong.

“I feel like there was always two factions in Bloc Party, the hard rock heads - our previous drummer and bass player - who made everything we did sound tougher and lo-fi, which was great,” Kele reflects. “But that’s not where my first sensibility is as a musician.”

“Touring the album Four, it became apparent to me that this isn’t really the kind of music I want to make. Although it seemed exciting when we were writing this music in New York, I got slightly bored by the macho type posturing vibe that comes with a lot of heavy or hard rock music. It just wasn’t my world.”

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Whatsapp Bloc Party in 2016 (L-R: Justin Harris, Louise Bartle, Kele Okereke, Russell Lissack).

Chapter 5: Hymns

With the departure of Tong (in 2013) and Moakes (in 2015) to pursue their own projects (the former drums in Algiers, the latter plays with Young Legionnaire) Okereke began writing what would become Bloc Party’s first album in four years.

“Hymns to me is kind of odd,” Okereke says. “Russell and I made Hymns ourselves really.”

Though the record features contributions from the band’s new bass player, Justin Harris (of Portland rock band Menomena), he was only officially inducted into the line-up, along with new drummer Louise Bartle (discovered after scouring YouTube), when Bloc Party began touring again in mid-2015.

For a group famed for their energy, on first impressions, Hymns is a shockingly subdued affair. Softer in tone, it rarely rises above a gentle throb; deliberately tamer and more centred than the isolated howls of Silent Alarm and A Weekend In The City, placing more focus on ever on Okereke’s delivery, even more so than his electropop excursions on The Boxer and Trick.

It’s an album that substitutes angst for evangelism, where sensuality and spirituality go hand in hand.



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“I wanted the music to have an almost quasi-spiritual feel,” Okereke explains. “I’m not really a religious person but I’m definitely moved by religious or devotional music, the sense that something is being communicated that is higher than just notes. That there’s a spiritual dimension to the music.”

That’s reflected in titles like ‘Virtue’ and ‘My True Name’, the Gregorian punctuations of ‘Only He Can Heal Me’, and ‘The Love Within’, which kicks off Hymns with a remixed quotation of ‘The Prayer’: ‘Lord give me grace/And dancing feet/As I conquer all anxiety’. Later, Okereke sings ‘I have learnt the way to pray.’

Sometimes these themes of salvation and grace are heavy-handed - ‘I used to find my answers in the Gospels of St. John/Now I find them in the bottom of a shot glass’, a lyric that lands with a thud against the slide guitars of ‘The Good News’.

Despite lacking the explosive rush of the band’s previous work, there are lyrical connections in the continued explorations of the intersections between sex, drugs, faith, and relationships.

The best songs express the confusion and disquiet that follow a profound break-up. Within the context of the band losing two of its original members and forcing themselves to reinvent, it’s easy to interpret ‘Different Drugs’, ‘Exes’, and ‘Living Lux’ - mournful meditations on being alone together – as addressing the group’s own frosty internal dynamics.

For this reason alone, Hymns turned off some long-time followers, and while some critics praised Bloc Party for bravely persisting to blossom in a new guise, others thought they sounded stuck, struggling to function beyond what made them so vital and stretched for a new direction.

Hymns is a transitional record, and Okereke admits as much. “I’ll always see that album as a sense of flux between what we were and what we will become,” he tells Double J.

“That’s why it was important for me for the music to have some kind of feeling; that it wasn’t just churning out the same thing. It needed to come from a different place because I wanted it to feel like a different band.”

“That’s what I wanted to explore with Hymns, this sense of ‘How can I possibly make music that feels sacred?’ That was the only real blueprint. I think it did, I’ll forever be proud of some of the music on that record.”

Released nine months after Hymns, spitfire 2016 single ‘Stunt Queen’ was a song borne of Bloc Party’s Australian tour around Falls Festival the previous summer and developed at soundchecks.

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Significantly, it was the first song written and performed by the new line-up. More importantly, and somewhat ironically, ‘Stunt Queen’ does what Four or Hymns could not: prove to older fans there’s still fire in the belly – complete with the coded lyrics and spontaneous energy of Silent Alarm but with the fingerprints of new bandmates. Bottom line, it bodes well for what comes next.

Chapter 6: Bloc Party 2.0

Bloc Party return to tour Australia in November, performing Silent Alarm front to back around the country. But as the group look backwards at their debut milestone, they’re also thinking about the next.

“This next two weeks of rehearsing, we’re going to be relearning the Silent Alarm material but we’re also going to be working on new music together," Okereke reveals to Double J.

“I think that’s what’s most exciting for me, looking forward,” Okereke declares. “We still haven’t actually made a record as a new band with Justin and Louise. That’s what the focus is on now, for me, after these Silent Alarm shows.”

There’s also the matter of another Kele Okereke solo record, following on from 2017’s acoustic-driven, genre-hopping Fatherland, as the musician casually drops when reflecting on his nearly 20 year career.

“I feel like I’d never imagined I’d be standing where I am now. I feel like being in Bloc Party has opened so many doors for me as a musician and as a creative person. I’ve made five albums with Bloc Party; I’ve made three solo albums, just finished making my fourth solo record. Finished making a musical [Leave To Remain, opening January in London], travelled the world as a DJ, on my own with an acoustic guitar.”

“I’ve really been able to make so much music and that was all I ever wanted at the start: to make music. I’m thankful that I’ve been able to make a living, a good living at that, as a musician and it’s still going. It’s a fight and it’s not easy but it’s still going.”

Playing Silent Alarm in full night after night might see ‘Bloc Party 2.0’ exploring new material that reconnects with the boundless energy that’s always made them a thrilling live act, or they’ll double down and go in the opposite direction.

It remains to be seen, and while they might never be the band they were, or the Bloc Party diehards want them to be, their commitment to dismantling their sound time after time should be commended. Whatever happens next, Okereke is proud of how Bloc Party’s achievements have been received.

“Even after I die, this music will exist forever and you should never take that for granted. That you’re given this opportunity to make something that people can take into their hearts and love forever.

“So much of the music I love now is by musicians that are no longer with us. The thought that, one day, what I make might comfort in the way that the music of Al Green or someone comforts me, is like a blessing and something I will always be thankful for.”