Kele Okereke has announced a new album, The Flames pt. 2. The Bloc Party frontman’s sixth solo LP is slated for release March 24 via KOLA Records/!K7. To accompany the news, Kele has shared a new single called ‘Vandal’, which you can check out below, along with the cover artwork and tracklist.
‘Vandal’ finds Kele channeling his frustration with what Britain stands for and what it means to be British, according to a press release. “As a British born Nigerian, that debate has made me angry,” Kele said. “It has felt like for these last few years I have been carrying around a lot of that anger, so with ‘Vandal’ I felt I needed to put it somewhere useful.”
“There haven’t been many things that have made me feel proud to be British recently but watching those people in Bristol pulling down the Colston statue made me feel immensely proud,” he continued. “It was ordinary people saying ‘no, this slaver does not represent my Britain’. It was an act of defiance that I understood and I suddenly got a glimpse of a Britain I could believe in.”
The Flames pt. 2 will follow 2021’s The Waves pt. 1, which Kele wrote and recorded during lockdown while feeling “lost at sea.” He explained:
I always knew that I would find a way out of that feeling, and I always knew I was going to make a response to The Waves.
Fire is powerful, it is both creation and destruction and I wanted that tension to somehow be reflected in the music, the sound of being consumed by our desires, of feelings burning so intensely that they literally burn out.
Like The Waves it was important that all the sounds of the record were made by my electric guitar. Writing and recording a record within these parameters has forced me to become more creative as a musician, from the looped ambient textures to the brittle drum machine rhythms. it’s all made by my guitar and my loop pedals, and that’s how it will be performed.
The Flames pt. 2 Cover Artwork:
The Flames pt. 2 Tracklist:
1. Never Have I Ever
2. Reckless
3. And He Never Was The Same Again
4. True Love Knows No Death
5. Vandal
6. Her Darkest Hour
7. No Risk No Reward
8. Someone To Make Me Laugh
9. I’m In Love With An Outline
10. Acting On A Hunch
11. Kerosene
12. The Colour Of Dying Flame
