Album Review: Bloc Party, Alpha Games

“We’re not the same band now,” Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke told an interviewer recently. He wasn’t just referring to the band’s shifting line-up, and the Londoners’ first LP in six years makes clear just how profoundly they have reconfigured since lighting up alternative rock in the mid-2000s.

But not all change is good and the Bloc Party of 2022 vintage feels like a pale echo of the outfit behind such bruised, thrilling hits as ‘Banquet’ and ‘Like Eating Glass’. A discombobulating glam obsession pokes through on the listless ‘The Girls Are Fighting’ with a ‘hey, hey!’ refrain that feels as if it was pinched from Slade circa 1973.

With midlife looming, the hope might have been that Okereke was open to chronicling his world from a different perspective. Weirdly, however, he seems to have made it his mission to sound like early Libertines on ‘Day Drinker’. And ‘Sex Magik’ – surely a Chili Peppers covers act out there somewhere wants its name back – features some of his hokiest lyrics ever (“In my sixteenth year she taught me things / Protect myself with flames and wings”).

Bloc Party were a great band and there are flashes of that majesty on ‘In Situ’, which suggests a Thames Estuary Talking Heads. And the group are to be praised for not leaning into old glories. It’s just a shame that their attempts to push forward have yielded such muddled results.