Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke announces new album ‘The Flames pt. 2’
Lead track 'Vandal' sees Okereke address his 'anger' about the debate about what it means to be truly British
By Nick Reilly
Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke has announced new album ‘The Flames pt. 2’ and shared the first single ‘Vandal’.
The sixth studio solo effort from the Bloc Party singer is set for release on March 24 2023 via Kola Records/!K7.
‘Vandal’ sees Okereke on scintillating form as he uses uncompromising guitars and electronic production to take aim at the debate about what it means to be truly British.
“As a British born Nigerian, that debate has made me angry,” Okereke said.
“It has felt like for these last few years I have been carrying around a lot of that anger, so with ‘Vandal’ I felt I needed to put it somewhere useful.”
“There haven’t been many things that have made me feel proud to be British recently but watching those people in Bristol pulling down the Colston statue made me feel immensely proud. It was ordinary people saying ‘no, this slaver does not represent my Britain’,” he added.
“It was an act of defiance that I understood and I suddenly got a glimpse of a Britain I could believe in.”
Opening up on the record as a whole, Okereke explained how he it acts as a “response” to his 2021 solo album ‘The Waves pt.1’.
“I always knew that I would find a way out of that feeling, and I always knew I was going to make a response to The Waves”, he said.
“Fire is powerful, it is both creation and destruction and I wanted that tension to somehow be reflected in the music,” he continued, “the sound of being consumed by our desires, of feelings burning so intensely that they literally burn out.”
He added: “Like The Waves it was important that all the sounds of the record were made by my electric guitar. Writing and recording a record within these parameters has forced me to become more creative as a musician, from the looped ambient textures to the brittle drum machine rhythms. it’s all made by my guitar and my loop pedals, and that’s how it will be performed.”
You can check out the track listing in full below.
1. ‘Never Have I Ever’
2. ‘Reckless’
3. ‘And He Never Was The Same Again’
4. ‘True Love Knows No Death’
5. ‘Vandal’
6. ‘Her Darkest Hour’
7. ‘No Risk No Reward’
8. ‘Someone To Make Me Laugh’
9. ‘I’m In Love With An Outline’
10. ‘Acting On A Hunch’
11. ‘Kerosene’
12. ‘The Colour Of Dying Flame’