Bloc Party: It's Time To Get Serious

According to Okereke, the sound and subjects of "Silent Alarm" were inspired by the time he and his bandmates were at university by day and hanging out in dance clubs by night. After two years touring behind "Silent Alarm," that world seemed to have changed dramatically, as would the band's sound. "A Weekend in the City" is a bleak portrait of modern life in post-millennial, post-Middle East-crisis England "because that's what I was observing in all my friends who were at home working or at university and now going into their career," Okereke says.

"There was a real malaise everywhere," he continues. "And every book that I was reading or every film that I saw that resonated with me, they all seemed to have this existential angst, and that really fed into what I wanted the record to be about: people in very mundane, ordinary situations but with this real level of alienation and dislocation underneath the surface, because that's literally all I was seeing when I was going back home to see my friends and my loved ones. All the optimism that we had at university about how we were going to make a difference had completely evaporated, and now there was just a real sense of disillusion."

At one point, the new album was titled "Post War Britain."

Elsewhere, Okereke addresses the empty escapism of drugs and alcohol. Describing false drug-fueled confidence in the anxious "On," Okereke sings, "You make my tongue loose / I am hopeful and stutter-free" (in conversation, he speaks slowly and softly with an occasional stutter) but insists any temporary high is followed by "a flatness bleaker than the one it replaced." Prescription drugs are addressed as well, with much the same consequence. In the majestically melancholy suicide meditation "SRXT" -- for Seroxat, a British version of the anti-depressant Paxil -- Okereke sings: "If u want to know what makes me sad / Well it's hope, the endurance of faith / A battle that lasts a lifetime / A fight that never ends."

But it's not all gloom. Toward the album's end, there's a lovely trio of love songs, starting with a yearning "Kreuzberg," set against the divides of the Berlin Wall and the one between intimacy and casual sex. The majestic "I Still Remember" looks at the thin line between friendship and romance, while "Sunday" insists on the possibility of "a private kind of happiness."

And on "Waiting for the 7:18," Okereke evokes the kind of anxious insecurity he found coming home last year, singing, "If I could do it again, I'd make more mistakes / Not be so scared of falling."

"Bear in mind the album isn't at all autobiographical," Okereke says. "There are parts of it that are, but very few. In that song I was really trying to conjure an image of this kind of midlife crisis, the late-30-year-old who had all these expectations in his youth and has come to realize that same old drudgery and routine is now what it's like -- it's about somebody coming to terms with the deadening nature of who he is and wishing they'd been more adventurous."

Like leaving college for the uncertainties of music? What career path had Okereke been on before he decided to be "more adventurous"?

"I was doing English literature at university," he replies. "Not as a career but because I had to get out of my parents' house. I don't know what I would have done, I really don't. The prospect of working in an office in that environment still fills me with complete dread, really. That why I knew I had to make this work."

Bloc Party Appearing Sunday at DAR Constitution Hall

Sources: In talking about the new album, Kele Okereke has cited such inspirations as author Bret Easton Ellis, whose "Less Than Zero" is an obvious influence on "Song for Clay," and Michel Houellebecq, a French novelist whose "The Possibility of an Island" addresses the moral bankruptcy of contemporary culture.