On August 18th, 2008, via a live webchat, Bloc Party announced that their new album was finished. Three days later and beyond, you could download that album. “We remember being teenagers,” says Okereke, “when [Oasis’s] Be Here Now came out and everyone at school rushed out to get it at lunchtime and listened to it and talked about it the next day – that doesn’t really happen any more, that sense of occasion.” Here, Okereke is of a mind with Jack White. Earlier this year, the sometimes White Striper insisted The Raconteurs’ second album be in the shops as soon as physically possible after recording was complete. No frontloaded marketing campaign, no singles fanfared in the media weeks beforehand – indeed, Bloc Party released the song “Mercury” with nary a whisper of “promotion” the week before the announcement of their new album, Intimacy. “It was a case of, ‘why do we need to sit on the record for six months?’” continues Okereke. “If we’ve finished it why don’t we just put it out there? We’re lucky that we have an international fanbase, so we know people will be excited by it. So,” he says with a smile and a shrug, “that’s all that mattered really.”

Intimacy is a fittingly up-close title for an album that is, immediately, in-your-face and in-your-ear. Even better: the medium isn’t just the message. That is: for all the innovation surrounding the method of its release – and fleet footed Bloc Party have outpaced both The Raconteurs and the In Rainbows-era Radiohead – Intimacy is remarkable not so much for how it got here, arriving instantaneously on desktops around the world, but for what it sounds like. Bloc Party’s third album is a thrillingly radical record, bristling with percussive innovation, scorching riffs, orchestral sampledelia, biting emotional candour and fuck-off tunes. It turns out that the radio-rattling “Mercury,” with its belting mix of drum&bass, rapping and brass that demands to be called “phat,” was a good clarion call.

Band Members

Kele Okereke (guitar, vocals), Russell Lissack (guitar), Gordon Moakes (bass), Matt Tong (drums)

Influences

everything that touches their ears.

Website

www.blocparty.com, www.blocparty.com/marshals, myspace.com/blocparty,