‘I will outshine them all’: the enduring genius of Bloc Party
When emo legends Paramore made their comeback with new single This Is Why in October, something about its blend of danceable guitar work and lyrical anxiety felt more than a little familiar. Speaking on her BBC podcast Everything Is Emo, frontwoman Hayley Williams revealed an unlikely source of inspiration for her band’s new direction and, indeed, their career as a whole.
“From day one, Bloc Party was the number one reference because there was such an urgency to their sound that was different to the fast punk or the pop-punk or the loud ‘wall of sound’ emo bands that were happening in the early 2000s,” she said. “They had their own thing and it really stuck with us … it just makes me feel even more excited to get back out into the world, and maybe cross paths with the band that has been a huge part of our story.”
As it turns out, Williams wasn’t willing to leave things to chance: early next year, Paramore will be taking Bloc Party out as main support on multiple legs of their sold-out 2023 world tour. It crystallises something that has been percolating over the past few years. Although Bloc Party may have faded from mainstream view in the mid-2010s, in 2022, a generation of new alternative artists including Willow, Genesis Owusu and Connie Constance are tapping into the indie disco heroes’ legacy.
Bloc Party’s rise to prominence feels like a quintessentially 2000s tale. Bumping into each other at the 1999 Reading festival, friends Russell Lissack and Kele Okereke decided to start a band, putting an ad in the NME in search of a Joy Division-loving bassist, eventually recruiting drummer Matt Tong after eight other contenders didn’t quite fit the bill. They broke through after delivering demo CDs and polite letters to Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand as well as Steve Lamacq, who promptly declared them “genius”.
Channelling the spirit of Radiohead’s OK Computer, Bloc Party imbued their early work with a distinctive velocity. They borrowed from the dance-punk that was making stars of the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem over in the US, matched the catchiness of their commercially minded peers and extended their reach into other realms, such as house, grime and R&B. Okereke was a fan of hip-hop producer Timbaland (see the band’s excellent 2009 Live Lounge cover of Nelly Furtado’s Say It Right), and his omnivorous tastes meant that Bloc Party appealed to the open-minded listener, whether they were a hardened Gang of Four fan or a desert scarf-wearing, glowstick-toting underage raver.
For teens in the mid-2000s, Bloc Party were part of your average NME starter pack: Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, Hard-Fi. But they pushed beyond the idea of making indie disco music for uni students to sink pints to, and the razor-sharp, stabbing Telecasters on their debut album, Silent Alarm, felt like a revelation. Nominated for the 2005 Mercury prize, it was celebrated as a record that felt energising yet introspective, capturing a sense of youthful ennui.
Bloc Party’s second album, 2007’s A Weekend in the City, made an even greater impact with its bird’s-eye view of the tumultuous British political landscape. The low hum of lead single The Prayer, with its cavernous drums and unabashed earnestness (“I will dazzle / I will outshine them all”), could be considered a perfect intersection of indie and emo.
The album discussed issues that have taken on more significance in broader culture in the years since: personal trauma as public entertainment, hedonism as a balm for extreme loneliness, queer love stories in a world that expects you to feel shame, racist surveillance and brutality. Musically, Okereke’s melodic constructions paved the way for many of the more interesting guitar bands that came after; you can hear A Weekend in the City in the math-rock flourishes of Foals, Everything Everything’s intricate wordplay and the Maccabees’ poignant sentimentality.
This musical triumph didn’t always come easy. Famously characterised by Liam Gallagher as looking like members of a “University Challenge team”, Bloc Party were often lampooned for leaning too far into their intellectual indie tag. Their website in the early years featured a bold manifesto (“Bloc Party is an autonomous unit of unextraordinary kids reared on pop culture between the years of 1976 and the present day …”), while Okereke frequently cited lofty literary inspirations, gleefully critiquing the scene’s less artistically inclined bands (Towers of London, anyone?).
A comedown from the Britpop era of big, playful personalities, this serious approach earned them a reputation for being uptight, not always inclined to play ball with the music press. “In the nine months since they were hailed as ‘the sound of 2005’, the London quartet have managed to cultivate a reputation for prickly reticence,” wrote the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis that year. “Despite their gripping stage presence, they seem utterly at odds with the prevalent notion of how a rock band should be.”
Looking back, any potential prickliness on Okereke’s side may have been a frustrated response to journalists who seemed more concerned with pinning down his sexuality and racialised experiences than discussing his music. Raised in Essex by Nigerian parents, Okereke was an outlier in a sea of predominantly white indie artists, and was frequently expected to carry the 00s mantle of Black ambassadorship alone, save for the odd mention of TV on the Radio or the Noisettes. In 2008, this division was magnified even further following an altercation with John Lydon, who Okereke claimed attacked him verbally and physically in a racist tirade backstage at a music festival – which Lydon denied.
Today, Okereke’s status as a genuine pioneer is clearer: we recognise what a feat it was for a Black, gay man to front one of the most enduring British groups of a less enlightened era. Beyond identity politics, however, he and his band also cemented the way in which guitar bands could defy tradition. Long before being genreless was the genre du jour, Bloc Party embodied the new frontier of online culture where torrenting and streaming made delineations between sounds feel almost arbitrary. (The upcoming shows with Paramore are not their first brush with MTV-era emo: in 2006, the band completed three dates supporting Panic! at the Disco before Matt Tong’s lung collapsed and they were forced to pull out.)
All these years later, Bloc Party’s influence can be heard in a disparate array of artists, not least the emerging Black and mixed-race musicians who grew up with Okereke as a tangible inspiration. Silent Alarm’s This Modern Love was only an album track, but it crops up time and time again as an example of quintessential indie songwriting; you can hear its influence in Rachel Chinouriri’s I’m Not Perfect (But I’m Trying) and Connie Constance’s Costa Del Margate. Both Willow’s Hover Like a Goddess and Genesis Owusu’s Get Inspired borrow from Okereke’s pacey guitar lines and vocals respectively, nodding towards Bloc Party’s punkier end.
Promising newcomer KennyHoopla apparently decided to pursue music seriously after discovering their work on a late-night YouTube binge. (A few years ago, he almost cried when I suggested to him that his single How Will I Rest in Peace If I’m Buried By a Highway? would likely earn the band’s approval.) At 25, Hoopla is only three years older than Okereke was when Silent Alarm was released, but he is now inspiring a new generation of his own – young Black kids who feel emboldened by the success of somebody who looks like them.
Much of what is happening in 2022 feels eerily similar to the landscape of 2007, when Bloc Party released A Weekend in the City: austerity and financial instability, political division, intense reflections on the balance between community and the individual. The Overload, Yard Act’s Mercury-nominated tale of reluctant capitalism, feels like a thematic descendent; Anywhere But Here, the excellent new release by London band Sorry, also carries the indie dance music torch, blending the twinkly light and sinister shade of disco, punk and pop. Whatever your interpretation of indie might be, it seems difficult to play a guitar in 2022 without channelling some of Bloc Party’s fractious energy, driven by the cyclic frustrations of the world.
Nearly 17 years on from their debut, some fans may have scratched their heads at the idea of Bloc Party touring in support of Paramore. But when you break it down, this union is a perfect example of exactly how far both indie and mainstream rock has come. Frontwomen or bandleaders of colour can be found in positions of mainstream visibility, melding sounds and scenes without a second thought. Confident, boundary-pushing musicians are increasingly praised for their vision and selfprotection, no longer misunderstood as being standoffish for cheap gags.
Like Paramore themselves, Bloc Party have had to counter their fair share of criticisms and controversial lineup changes, but they have also proved that a long-lasting career is possible if you are bold and willing to look beyond the expectations of industry gatekeepers. Where both bands had to struggle to stake their claim in their respective mid-00s scenes, together, in 2022, they seem right at home.