Kele Okereke 'Exhales' After Five Years on the Road

Posted on Jun 23rd 2010 2:00PM by Mike Ayers

Seconds after bursting out of London in 2004, Bloc Party took the world by storm with three records and a non-stop, five-year touring cycle. So it's no surprise that they'd want some time off, yet for lead singer Kele Okereke, he managed to record his first solo album, a vocal house-inspired electronica album called 'The Boxer,' which is out now.

"It was kind of relentless," Okereke tells Spinner about Bloc Party's first five years on the road. "It took that time out to exhale." In that sense, Okereke's new work abandons the more angular, Gang of Four post-punk that highlights Bloc Party's work and finds him reflecting on his last few years, where he's spent most of his 20s in the pop music spotlight (he turns 30 this October). Case in point: the album's sixth track, 'New Rules.'

"It's about being older, a sense of perspective," he explains. "As you get older you can get more at peace with life. I think that's what this song is about. Exhaling and enjoying the time that you have. It took a while to get that."

While it doesn't initially sound like it, Okereke explains that 'New Rules' started off with him just noodling around on an acoustic guitar, but then grew into something radically different. "I didn't want to do something that was just a ballad. We ended up constructing it out of all these samples. It was very painstaking. And then we transposed the guitar part to it, to the string part. It's quite wild."

That said, it's not like the Bloc Party break is looking like it'll be super long, as the group already has seeds as to what could be their follow-up to 2008's 'Intimacy.' "We started writing some songs in 2009," Okereke says. "I think we'll reconvene and start to look at those songs again. It might be enough to generate a whole bunch of new material. We'll see."

After an appearance at Glastonbury, Okereke will take his solo project on a headlining UK tour for the first half of July before jumping across to the US for a club tour starting at Chicago's Metro on July 23.