Kele Okereke previews new album ‘The Flames, Pt. 2’ with first track ‘Vandal’

Arriving as a response to last year’s album ‘The Waves, Pt. 1’, Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke has announced that his sixth solo album ‘The Flames, Pt. 2’ will be out on 24th March via KOLA Records / !K7.

“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,” he notes. “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.”

Giving us our first taste of what to expect, Kele has also shared striking lead single ‘Vandal’. “As a British born Nigerian, that debate has made me angry. 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. 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.”

Have a listen to ‘Vandal’ below.

‘The Flames, Pt. 2’ Tracklisting:

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