Bloc Party have announced their return with their sixth album, ‘Alpha Games’, set to drop next year.
Alongside the release of the lead single, ‘Traps’, Kele Okereke and co have announced the long-awaited follow-up to 2016’s ‘Hymns’ will arrive on April 29.
Speaking of the rock-leaning new track, frontman Kele said: “From the moment we wrote ‘Traps,’ we knew it had to be the first thing people heard from this album.
“Playing it in soundchecks on our last tour before it was finished and hearing how it sounded in those big rooms and outdoors.”
Over on Twitter, the band wrote: “Thank you for waiting patiently, we’ve missed you and we can’t wait to share everything we’ve been working on.”
In 2018, Bloc Party performed their seminal LP ‘Silent Alarm’ in full on tour across Europe.
The year before, Kele teamed up with Years & Years frontman Olly Alexander on “romantic duet”, ‘Grounds For Resentment’.
Both frontmen are openly gay and decided to release the track in a bid to break the taboo surrounding musicians in the pop industry who feel they have to use “codes” to talk about their sexuality in songs rather than being straight-talking about same-sex relationships.
Kele, 40, said the single – which featured on his solo LP ‘Fatherland’ – was just the starting point for breaking the barrier down, as he admitted there is “a long way to go” with regards to homosexual pop stars feeling confident enough to “describe love and desire authentically”.
He said at the time: “I remember reading something that [Olly] wrote about the use of pronouns in pop music for gay artists that I thought that was very perceptive and intelligent – that the use of pronouns was the last frontier for gay artists.
“There are lots of gay acts that avoid using the term he when singing about same sex desire.
“It will just be a neutral term, whereas Olly understands from what I read that there is a long way to go for gay musicians in being able to describe love and desire authentically.
“So I was very happy to sing a romantic duet with him on my album, because I couldn’t think of a precedent of any out gay musicians singing a love song to one another without having to hide behind codes.”
Kele was referring to an interview Olly, 31, did previously where he said he’d like to see more mainstream gay stars be more open about their sexuality, and praised pop megastar Miley Cyrus for promoting a “non-binary gender”.
The ‘Alpha Games’ tracklisting is:
1. ‘Day Drinker’
2. ‘Traps’
3. ‘You Should Know the Truth’
4. ‘Callum Is a Snake’
5. ‘Rough Justice’
6. ‘The Girls Are Fighting’
7. ‘Of Things Yet to Come’
8. ‘Sex Magik’
9. ‘By Any Means Necessary’
10. ‘In Situ’
11. ‘If We Get Caught’
12. ‘The Peace Offering’
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