That Drum Pattern Before Everything Else

There’s a drum pattern at the start of The Prayer that I can’t unhear once it’s in my head—it arrives before everything else, and then Kele’s voice comes in, and for about thirty seconds nothing else exists. I’ve had that happen with maybe a dozen songs in my life. Bloc Party are responsible for several of them.

Their records—Silent Alarm, A Weekend in the City, Intimacy—represent a band that refuses to make the same record twice. Angular post-punk, then anxious social observation, then fractured electronics. Intimacy took me a while; it felt brittle and cold in the first few listens, which turned out to be exactly what it was and also exactly what it needed to be. Two More Years and Blue Light are wired into specific years in a way I can’t always reconstruct consciously but feel clearly whenever either comes on. The chords of Helicopter tied to a particular summer. Uniform at a specific volume at 2 a.m.

One More Chance came out as a summer single and it has the quality Bloc Party singles tend to have: immediate, precise, British in a way that feels earned rather than performed. The video was a mess—I watched it twice and still couldn’t tell you what was happening in it. But a Bloc Party song I don’t fully understand is still a Bloc Party song, and that’s always been enough.