Moving from hooky post-punk to ambitious genre-mashing – and back again – Bloc Party’s artistic restlessness has served them well since the early 2000s. The mix of Kele Okereke’s impassioned yelp and Russell Lissack’s angular riffs on their first EPs helped shape British indie rock for the rest of the decade, but by the time Bloc Party released their platinum-selling 2005 debut album Silent Alarm, they’d added atmospheres drawn from post-rock and electronic textures to their style.
The East London band continued to push themselves on 2007’s A Weekend in the City and the following year’s Intimacy, incorporating influences from hip-hop to modern composition and writing songs that ranged from socially aware to deeply personal. Bloc Party’s later albums were also adventurous, whether they borrowed some of post-hardcore’s bite on 2011’s Four or mused on spirituality on 2016’s reflective, redemptive Hymns. Despite hiatuses and lineup changes, when they returned to their razor-sharp post-punk on 2022’s Alpha Games, Bloc Party sounded as fresh as ever.
