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Bloc Party
HYMNS is a rebirth for Bloc Party. After 16 years as a band, countless world tours and awards and four studioalbums, Kele Okereke and Russell Lissack are taking it back to where it all began.
As the title suggests, the fifth Bloc Party record is about faith and devotion, but it is not, Kele insists, a religiousepiphany. “I grew up in a religious house so I’m fully aware of the imagery, but I’m not Christian. It’s notsomething I subscribe to.”Instead, the concept came to him after seeing the author Hanif Kureishi, whom Kelehas admired since he was at school, talk at the Southbank Centre in London. The author of My BeautifulLaundrette and Intimacy was discussing evangelical art and how unfashionable it has become. “And that pointstuck with me because it seemed like for me music had originated in a religious place. The first music I everheard was hymns at school. I started to think, if I was going to make music that had a spiritual dimension, thatwas sacred to me and to the things that I held important, how would I do it?”says Kele.
The result is a record that sounds like a band growing and changing, pushing new sounds via new approaches,and resulting in more free, less constricted Bloc Party. “When we started this band, we were all about beingloud and spiky, and all the sounds had to confront,”Kele explains. “With the way I sang, the way the drumshad to fill every moment, was very confrontational. After making Four, which was very abrasive, I wanted tomake something more sensual, that took you in and hugged you, rather than hit you around the face. It wasnice to let the atmospheres take over, to pull everything back, as opposed to it being a fight, or a duelingmatch.”