It’s a moody day, a kind of grey, and we’re waiting for Kele to arrive at John Henry’s Studios near Camden. Gordon Moakes busies himself with equipment, Matt Tong has disappeared somewhere and Russell Lissack is curled up on the floor, sleeping off a heavy night at Trash’s last party. (‘Everyone was there – Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons...all gnawing their faces off!’) The band’s publicist jokes that the fiery frontman ‘is probably fretting about what to wear,’ but when Kele rocks up, headphones firmly implanted, more profound thoughts are etched across his brow. The quizzical lines dissolve as he smiles broadly. Kele and Matt head to the greasy spoon upstairs, while I take a seat with Gordon in the studio.

‘I could tell that he (Kele) had a vision, there’s no other way to put it,’ bassist Gordon remembers. We get to talking about the departure this record makesfrom the genius ‘Silent Alarm,’ with its hallucinogenic vocals, frenetic paceand abstract subject matter. He reasons, ‘It is a willed attempt to go inanother direction, but people know that the logical thing to do for a band likeus is not to do the obvious thing.’ This time the band has printed all of Kele’slyrics, which retain the same urgency but carve a certain starkness thatinsists you mark each word. ‘Oh yeah, the time spent on the lyrics has beenthreefold if not more this time,’ he continues. I wonder how the band feelabout bolstering lyrics that are so deeply personal to their frontman;have the lines taken on significance for each individual member? ‘Yeah,definitely. I mean, I don’t identify in every case but I think if you taketunes like ‘Uniform,’ they’re kind of a statement that we didn’t do before.’‘Uniform,’ has trademark Bloc Party drums – above a brooding bassline theirmounting rhythm wrenches the track according to its will, charging before Kele’s ‘We can’t be hurt,’ is through and taking you to a rougher terrain. Whenhe urges, ‘Have another line, have another drink,’ Russell’s guitar snaps intoa euphoric solo which fades to the faint sample of a siren: grisly reality isback, where everyone ‘look(s) the same.’ The tune takes off from a shoppingmall, some vast glittering shrine to ‘disappointment,’ where the guitars aretentative and sombre piano chords march past windows, faces and lights.

‘I don’t think we (the band apart from Kele) necessarily acknowledge the effect of the lyrics really, but it’s only because with this record the lyrics were kind of the last piece of the jigsaw.’ This monolith of an album certainly feels like it has been constructed to a grand design, just like the city that is its subject. Gordon insists that ‘Going into a room and trying things out is still there in the band, alongside this other idea of trying to build things mechanically and digitally, so there’s two sides I suppose. It’s still quite organic and we still keep things really loud!’ The fact that the band only just played new single ‘Prayer,’ live and all together in the studio a week before – ‘It was fun!’ – reflects this new nuts-and-blots brand of Bloc Party, which can be stripped to components that engineer a more complex and varied sound. Layers also make the tunes harbour internal twists. Gordon continues, ‘You know it’s a cliché, bands say they can’t go on writing punk rock songs forever, but it’s just focusing the energy in different ways – the suspense is still there.’ Indeed, the entire album operates along a seething energy; rushing toescape, urging oblivion, raging until the end, hopelessly wishing back theold times and then resisting the pressure to move forward. Although equalin mental and emotional energy, these different and very human impulsesmove the body at varying speeds, just as time becomes distorted andirregular within the chaotic cities we inhabit. ‘A Weekend In The City,’ windsabout this warped clock of human experience, lurching and pausing by turns– the overall rhythm of the record undulates a great deal more. Gordon ispleased with the ‘variety’ on the new album, which ranges from ‘The riffy monster track which is ‘Song For Clay,’ and then there’s ‘SRXT,’ that’s veryintrospective and kind of a little harder to do, especially since we’re knownfor our pace.’ ‘SXRT’ is named after an anti-depressant and suggests suicide,but all against a backdrop of rousing melody and life affirming beats. I wait to ask Kele about the lyrics in that one, but Gordon agrees about its upward movement; ‘Yes, it’s full of life when it kicks in. I was just listening to itactually and imagining it as maybe some future show with an orchestra and choir. There was no outlet for ‘SXRT’ to go, so it could only be the last track,it just had to go in. It’s a pity we don’t have the technology to have alternative track endings (laughs) It would be quite nice, because ‘Sunday’ is almost like the happy ending and ‘SRXT’ is like the sad one. But on the first record wehad ‘Confidence,’ so we were conscious of not repeating that pattern of thereflective thing coming last.’ And of course ‘SXRT’ is a song written aboutendings, signing the madness off.

‘Poetry is a loaded term but to just read the words is worth a lot. I certainly felt for the first time that this is representative of more than just a quarter of us. I wouldn’t have changed much about that, which is always a good sign! (Laughs) With tracks like ‘Song For Clay,’ I just love that line, ‘Live the dream like the 80s never happened,’ it’s just perfect. (Chuckles again) It’s a great line.’ While he’s been on the road and partying back home, Kele has developed a taste for knife-edged lyrics, targeting everything and everyone housed within the heaving metropolis: The Daily Mail, young urbanites, politicians, TV, Converse trainers, tattooed arms, commerce and excess. ‘January is endless / Weary eyed and forlorn / The Northern line is the loudest,’ and the beat goes on. Kele’s depiction of the city strikes a chord with Gordon: ‘It’s just that Shoreditch mentality and I suppose I tolerated it for a while...You’re a student, then you get a job, then you rebel against your job and that’s the kind of vibe, especially in London. I can relate to that sense of failure in you know, thinking that it’s your friend and then thinking that you hate it, trying to grapple with it.’ While Kele still lives in the East London area that is his tormentor and his saviour by turns, Gordon moved out a while ago – ‘I wouldn’t want to live there forever!’

The album itself ultimately leaves London to breathe other air, just like this city centric record was actually recorded in rural Ireland, where their producer could shield them from distractions. One day ‘He walked out and could hear this song throbbing through the walls – he wanted to get a mic out there and record the ambient noise.’ So fragile birdsong sounds for a brief moment after ‘Waiting For The 7.18,’ and its dream of escape, only to catapult us into ‘The Prayer,’ with its charged, unfaltering drums and tribal chanting. ‘I can imagine that the birds might have worked at the end almost, because you’ve had this whole experience of being in the city but it’s finite. But here the little hint of birdsong is almost like a vision of the escape, a moment of respite...And then bang! (Laughs) The next tune is there!’ Written into ‘7.18’ itself is this urgent treasuring of fragments; the ‘Just give me moments,’ refrain acknowledging that lasting peace or fulfilment are a fallacy. And so the sounds of the city amplify themselves to impact on their tunes: distant American talkshow chatter, foreign tongues, harsh metallic grating effects and even a train announcement compete with the band as they play – ‘That’s when Kele had a Dictaphone and just recorded it on the Central Line, coming out at Liverpool Street Station. So we literally used the urban noise, not just imitated it.’ It’s this ‘noise’ that Gordon remembers as the worst thing about living so centrally, he ‘never became immune to it,’ as this record echoes well. Ironically enough, I can’t even write a paragraph of this feature without a siren screaming outside the window of Notion’s Shoreditch office – playing on the stereo, Bloc Party’s cacophonous cityscape is bleeding back into and reverberating around its sources, adding to the mayhem and making me type faster. Can’t be bad!

However, as Gordon says, ‘The point is it isn’t a theory, it’s still a record, it still works at a kind of basic level with drums and guitars or whatever.’ Gordon himself steps up to the drums this time around as well. At a Bethnal Green studio they used, ‘We found this little, very poor sounding kit. So we just brought it in and started messing around with it.’ On ‘Sunday’ the band decided to bring it back to being all about the beats. Gordon (who is left handed) sits alongside Matt and his kit – ‘We’re going to get ‘Bloc Party’ written backwards on mine, so that it looks like a reflection,’ - the two playing drum parts that both collide and compete. Computer generated beats marry their rhythm in the mix. ‘So, it (the drumming) is still one of the most important things for us, but it’s manifesting itself in different ways. There were a handful of songs that started with guitar parts, like ‘Song for Clay,’ and ‘I Still Remember,’ but I’d say seven times out of ten, we were thinking about drums.’ We return to Bloc Party’s original breakthrough: a band that wanted their tunes to ‘Sound good in a club. We’re inspired by that, when there’s a pounding about the beat that you can’t get away from.’ ‘Silent Alarm’ was the pounding of primal, unharnessed energy. Here the pounding we’re hounded by as we listen is always aimed at a particular target: it has an object and it has a name - rage, addiction, fear, alienation, desire, disbelief...Like Gordon says, ‘There’s a hundred different expressions, so let’s try something.’ His shrug and grin read, ‘Job done!’

I find Kele and Matt watching the news on TV, eating chicken, chips and peas out of polystyrene containers. The media is just one element of modern life that Kele struggles to believe in. ‘Misinformed and full of despair,’ is how he describes the city dwellers in his stories; ‘Information is still being mediated and kind of prescribed by somebody else.’ By contrast, Kele’s language is simple, undiluted, often repeating lyrics so that they become hypnotic mantras. Lines like ‘I can charm them, I can charm the room,’ get repeated and scratch themselves onto your consciousness like miniature terrorists. Or is this the limit of language itself? The voice in ‘On,’ a barely disguised ode to cocaine, repeats itself as the drug wears the user down; his tongue is ‘loose’ but his words lose meaning every time they get regurgitated into London’s senseless nocturnal vortex. ‘Deflation,’ is the word Kele now selects for this chemical effect. Cleverly enough, the repeated lines also impart the quality of cocaine cravings, as well as reinforce the cyclical nature of an addict’s Saturday night: racking one up, snorting it, spouting some rubbish, snorting another, saying the same thing again. And then the paranoia arrives. Not only do lyrics utter themselves over and over, but vocals get echoed, stretched, layered and distorted: sparring voices compete both above London’s beastly roar and inside its citizens’ heads. ‘Uniform’ uses echoing, harmonised question and answer sequences, but do lines like ‘You can be happy just playing dumb,’ represent some inner persuasion or the Big Brother style dictates of the city outside? Or have these boundaries crumbled completely?

Over to the lyricist himself: ‘The fragmenting effect of the media and our general loss of identity was something I wanted to capture. That’s why there are so many affected and manipulated vocals or drum beats, everything is kind of sampled or looped. It’s not just a band playing songs, everything sounds like it’s being processed.’ The record opens with some fine vocal manipulation from Kele: his brooding solo suddenly switches pitch and style, the soprano tones imparting an altogether different voice and identity. But the band offers this human record up to London’s supreme machine, rendering Kele’s very lines fragile messages from an endangered species. As he points out, ‘Everyone experiences technology everyday – that had to make it into the music.' Just as our lives are becoming mechanised, the city in Kele’s lyrical imagination is almost as human as its own denizens: 'This sense of the city being a living kind of entity, that’s why it's not just focused on one person’s perspective throughout, it's lots of different stories.’ Here he pre-empts my question about 'SRXT' - across a record that is designed to be a kind of reservoir for so many jostling lives and emotions, the distinctions between self and other dissolve; it's the purity of the feeling and how that makes its dent upon the mechanics of the city that counts. Nor am I going to ask Kele how much there is of himself in the character from 'Hunting For Witches,' who sits 'On the roof of (his) house / With a shotgun,' threatening how 'Heads are going to roll.' Elsewhere on the record policemens’ faces are stamped upon, judges' fingers are broken and ballerinas' feet cut off, but it's more an atmosphere of violence than anybody's particular crime. 'SRXT' is unique because it empties itself into an expansive rural landscape - we remember the wind that buildings deflect for the first time. If leaving the city behind encodes death, then is it our life blood as well as a 'vampire'? For Matt the vampires are characters on the scene who 'aren't really projecting enthusiasm or inspiration, they just want to take from other people.' Kele even becomes a body snatcher as he ventriloquises these figures, and now he talks about himself as a kind of human radio, a loudspeaker for diverse voices and dialects: 'I have to be as receptive to the outside world as possible when I'm writing songs. I'm always writing and jotting things down all the time, because the more I'm tuning, the better my work will be.' As a group, Matt reckons 'We've got a lot more focus and are more unified this time round,' which must account for their assured delivery and the courage to leave their signature breakneck speed behind. Still, he reveals how 'Waiting For The 7.18,' - the drum n bass tinged track where Duncan strikes a kit as well - 'Wasn't supposed to be like that at all, it was meant to be very slow and sombre and pretty downbeat but it's better for me this way!' Kele continues: 'As a band we don't tend to like very much, to chop and change and musically... We don't leave much space, we use anything that's kind of urgent and kind of uh, uh, uh!' And it's back to classic Bloc Party antics: high octane music with a heavy heart.

It seems the only way out of the duplicitous city for Kele's characters, or indeed the band themselves, is disco or death. Just as Duncan described their common love for beats that pound, the dancefloor is a place of sanctuary, almost spiritual, where everyone is equal, honest, spontaneous. In Kele's words, 'It's one of the few places that people can go to have an immediate experience that isn't mitigated by any external factors. It's like you're part of a community, just working to the music - it's something rare in modern life that you experience it in a pure form.' And so runs the lyric: 'Standing on the packed dancefloor / Our bodies thrown in time / Silent on the weekdays / Tonight I claim what’s mine.' The weekend intensifies urban evils but also magnifies moments of clarity. It's a hyper reality where Kele sees 'magic' but also menace, just like how London freezes him in a no man's land somewhere between fascination and recoil.

Before I leave Bloc Party to belt out those beats I want to know why they think people should hear the new album. Because it contains 'a love that is louder than words'? Because, like Gordon says of the deserted, neon bathed cityscape on the record’s sleeve, 'You can project anything onto it'? Or is it more monumental than that? 'Because we are the voice of today!' Kele sniggers, cracking the other guys up. Jokes aside, in just seven words, Kele may have smashed it; if we ever required a band to represent us, Bloc Party would do themselves proud.

BLOC PARTY'S 2ND ALBUM 'A WEEKEND IN THE CITY' IS AVAILABLE NOW (WICHITA RECORDINGS)

WORDS: LUCY WILSON

PHOTOGRAPHY: DAVID RYLE