Following the news of his anticipated sixth solo album, The Flames pt. 2, due Friday 24th March via KOLA Records / !K7, Bloc Party frontman Kele (Kele Okereke) has today shared the album’s second single, ‘True Love Knows No Death’.
Breathlessly delivered over his signature guitar loops and beats, ‘True Love Knows No Death’ is a love letter to the people you’ve never noticed before. Kele explains, “Since the pandemic I've been spending a lot more time at home, walking around my neighbourhood a lot more, and noticing people that I hadn’t really noticed before. This song is an ode to the people that I see everyday, people that are living on the edge, choosing to live outside of society, for better or for worse.’
The Flames pt. 2 arrives as a response to 2021’s The Waves pt. 1, an album Kele wrote and recorded during lockdown; a time at which he felt as though he was lost at sea. “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.
If The Waves pt.1 was about inertia and the feeling of life spinning out of control then The Flames pt. 2 is the unflinching of holding your hand to the fire and keeping it there, no matter how uncomfortable those feelings might be.
“Fire is powerful, it is both creation and destruction and I wanted that tension to somehow be reflected in the music,” tells Kele. “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.”
Bloc Party will tour the UK in April 2023 to support Paramore on their first UK tour since 2018. The six date run will visit Dublin, Cardiff, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham in addition to a highly anticipated London show at The O2 Arena on Thursday 20th April. The two bands will then tour the US together in May and June.
