Bloc Party Return With Infectious New Single ‘The Love Within’
Bloc Party have officially ended their second “indefinite hiatus” with “The Love Within,” the first track from the British crew’s upcoming, still-untitled fifth LP. The cut displays a more tempered, matured Bloc Party as “The Love Within” strips away the frantic and abrasive tone of Kele Okereke and company’s early albums, yet their sense of carving a dancefloor-ready rocker remains crisply intact. Bloc Party’s new album, the band’s first since 2012’s Four, will arrive in early 2016.
Bloc Party’s new lineup consists of Okereke – who released his second solo LP Trick in 2014 – and founding guitarist Russell Lissack alongside Menomena bassist Justin Harris and drummer Louise Bartle. In March 2015, after the band’s hiatus came to an end, longtime bassist Gordon Moakes announced he wasn’t involved in Bloc Party’s new music and was instead focusing on his own Young Legionnaire project.
That same month, Okereke revealed to Australian radio station Triple J that Bloc Party were working on new music. The singer also unveiled a snippet of a new song titled “Exes,” which Bloc Party performed – alongside another new track titled “The Good News” – during the band’s recent visit to London’s Maida Vale studios for BBC 6 Music’s live series.
“It’s sounding like nothing that we’ve done before but that’s what everyone always says. We’re at the writing/recording phase. We’ve started recording – I think we have about 18 [song] ideas and we’re going to lay them down properly in the next few months,” Okereke said. “We’ve always had very disparate elements to our music. This record feels like an evolution of where we were. So far there’s nothing that I can compare it to really in terms of other musicians, whereas in the past I always could — we were always trying to reference something else. I feel that this is very much our own record.”
Bloc Party will head out on a tour of Europe and Australia starting November 27th in Amsterdam.