Bloc Party

In late January next year, the Londoners will release their fifth LP, Hymns, but despite their longevity, Bloc Party have been walking on thin ice for a number of years. With the four founding members dabbling in various extracurricular projects – most notably frontman Kele Okereke, who last year released his second solo album, Trick – there’s been speculation about the band’s impending break-up since at least 2008. These forecasts looked to have come true when original drummer Matt Tong and bass player Gordon Moakes left the band in 2013.

However, Okereke and co-founder/guitarist Russell Lissack remain. And with the addition of former Menomena bassist Justin Harris and 21-year-old drummer Louise Bartle, Bloc Party will bring in the New Year in Australia.

“I think the closest I ever got to believing Bloc Party wasn’t going to carry on was when we were touring the States at the start of 2013,” says Okereke. “It just felt we really weren’t communicating very well as a unit, and I was feeling that there probably wasn’t going to be any point in us carrying on as a band if this was what it was going to be like the whole time.”

Okereke wasn’t the only one feeling a touch dismayed. The intra-band frigidity catalysed Tong’s exit midway through the tour. Despite being an integral member for nearly 15 years, however, the drummer’s departure proved rather fortuitous.

“A friend of mine from London [Sarah Jones of Hot Chip] came out to play drums for us,” says Okereke. “I think it was when Sarah came out to drum with us that I started having fun again, to be honest. I started realising that actually touring could be fun if you had people around you that you liked and that you got on with. It was at that point I realised that I didn’t want to just throw away what we had. I wanted to make another record because I was enjoying it again, really.”

Evidently, the persistent rumours concerning Bloc Party’s shaky constitution have been more than just hearsay. After touring behind 2008’s Intimacy,a cloud of internal mugginess led to an extended hiatus. During this time, Okereke released his first solo album, The Boxer – a record entrenched in the world of dance-pop and house music. Despite the musical disparity, it was a reinvigorating experience, and Bloc Party soon reconvened to work on 2012’s Four.Similarly, while Okereke’s enthusiasm surged during the latter part of the 2013 tour, immediately afterwards he returned to his solo project.

“I knew that I was going to be making a solo record regardless of what was happening with the Bloc Party situation,” he says. “It was kind of a separate entity. It was lucky for me, because it meant that we didn’t have to deal with what was going on immediately and it meant that I could focus on doing what I wanted to do and then have some kind of space.”

Four marked Bloc Party’s return to guitar-centric songwriting and live, organic recording practices, following the electronic coordinates of Intimacy.In some ways, Hymns straddles the line between these two records, while also recalling some of Trick’spleasing sensuality.

“Every record that you make is somehow connected to where you’ve been before, immediately,” says Okereke. “Four was a very abrasive, kind of confrontational-sounding record, which was what we wanted to make. I knew making Trick that I wanted the record to sound a lot more sensual, and just a lot more comforting. I feel that that attitude then carried on [into] Hymns. I don’t think that there’s any distortion at all on Hymns. I was adamant that the sounds had to be clean and to be spacious. I just didn’t want it to at all resemble Four.”

The title of the band’s fifth record doesn’t necessarily foreshadow songs of praise, but Okereke grew up in a religious family. While he’s not a practising Christian, the marrow of the new record is openly spiritual.

“The idea for Hymns was to present music that had a certain atmosphere or reverence to it,” he says. “I knew that the title of the album was going to be Hymns as soon as we started writing, and it was a challenge to me to make a record that has that kind of ambience that I experienced when first listening to hymns, or first singing hymns when I was at school. To have that kind of awe and celebration in the music was something I wanted to try and recapture.”

Okereke’s songwriting has always possessed an underlying earnestness. Likewise, despite the accessibility of his career output, he hasn’t refrained from painting himself in a vulnerable light. However, his creative process isn’t one of pointed introspection. “That’s something that I never intentionally do, but there are obviously going to be aspects of how you see the world in the music. I wasn’t really thinking about myself, I was thinking about, ‘How do I depict something that feels sacred?’”

Upon the announcement of Hymns, Okereke described the album as unlike any other music currently being made. It’s a bold claim, no doubt, but regardless of whether the record’s an utter original, he certainly wasn’t interested in appeasing demands for more of the same.

“From our first album [2005’s Silent Alarm], we were battling expectations of what people thought we were going to be about. People had only heard ‘Banquet’ and the songs that were on the Banquet EP, and the term ‘post-punk revival’ kept being bandied about. So we were adamant when we were recording our first record that we needed to show more colours instead of just monochrome – it needed to be a fully rounded record. I think with every record we’ve made, we’ve tried to step away from where we were as a band.”

Indeed, each Bloc Party album has conspicuously deviated from its predecessor; the cause of much consternation among conservative members of the band’s listenership. However, Bloc Party’s high billing on this year’s Falls Festival lineup indicates the extent of their prevailing popularity.

“If I’m completely honest, I don’t really put any thought into what the fans are going to be thinking,” Okereke says. “I think at this stage in our career, anyone that has followed us from the beginning will see that our music has taken lots of different U-turns. I think people now are coming to expect that, which is a blessing in one sense, because it means we are allowed to explore what we want to explore without feeling hemmed in.

“Every time you put out a record, it feels like someone is saying it doesn’t sound like what they want us to [sound like]. But I think that’s a good thing, and I think that’s always going to happen. So people need to stop minding or they need to go somewhere else.

“When we made Silent Alarm, our first record, nobody was telling us what to do. We were doing what we wanted, and that hasn’t changed. With every record that we’ve ever made, it’s been an exploration of where we were at as artists and as human beings. That isn’t really going to change. I’ve never listened to what other people say and I’m not going to start now.”