Bloc Party Detail New Album With Trevor Horn, Share ‘Love Bombs’

Bloc Party have set a September 11th release for their next album, Anatomy Of A Brief Romance, produced by Trevor Horn. The pairing isn’t an obvious one—Horn’s history stretches from the Buggles to Seal, helping invent a certain kind of pop maximalism—but it signals an interest in pushing the band’s sound outside standard guitar-band frameworks. Much of the record, they say, deals with the body: attraction, lust, exposure.

The first track from it, ‘Love Bombs’, is built on taut synth lines and an insistent vocal from Kele Okereke. There’s urgency in his delivery, less coiled than in their earliest material but still direct. Okereke frames the song as a portrait of new romance’s precarious peak. “At the start of a new relationship our feelings of connection can make us do dramatic things,” he explained. “‘Love Bombs’ is the sound of a new love flowering, in beautiful romantic gestures. But under the surface is the ever present fear that maybe this new love, although shiny and great, maybe this new love might not last forever.”

That tension—between intoxication and collapse—fits a band that has long worked unease into its melodies. Bloc Party will tour the US with Interpol later this year, another act still finding ways to move forward without abandoning its identity. ‘Love Bombs’ is out now.