One of the worst things a music writer can do is herald a band’s supposed “return to form,” as if that group’s prior, more recent output existed somewhere arbitrarily outside their own creative context. But we’ll be damned if Bloc Party’s new single “Traps” didn’t transport us back to the glorious last-party days of the mid- to late-2000s, and represent Kele & Co.’s more incendiary and explosive track in quite some time.
It dropped back before Thanksgiving here in the States, and we’ve had it on a continuous loop since, fitting somewhere alongside a playlist of their bridge era between iconic debut album Silent Alarm and the oft-misunderstood followup, A Weekend In The City (which holds up a lot better than you probably think, you sad bastard). As we noted last month, “Traps” is an absolute ripper of a tune fueled by the high-octane post-punk and propulsive percussion that made Bloc Party so damn great back in the aughts. It makes us wish indie dance nights were still a thing.
“From the moment we wrote ‘Traps’, we knew it had to be the first thing people heard from this album; playing it in soundchecks on our last tour before it was finished and hearing how it sounded in those big rooms and outdoors,” says Kele Okereke.
“Traps” is the first taste of Bloc Party’s forthcoming sixth studio album, Alpha Games, due out April 29 via Infectious / BMG, and was produced by Nick Launay and Adam Greenspan (Nick Cave, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, IDLES). Today (December 8), it gets the music video treatment, and the visual puts us right in the frenzied personal space of the band as they blast right through it.
Watch it below; alleged form get fucked.