Late Night Tales

“They were like, ‘It just needs a bit more work in places,’” he recalls. “At the time I was like, ‘Ahhh, what the fuck’ and I wasn’t into it.” But realising, “It was my second solo record, it needed to be a step up,” he took heed to the advice given, battling burnout to emerge with an incredibly sensual record that stands as the end-of-night accompaniment to the peak-hour beats found on his 2010 debut, The Boxer.

Okereke has long acknowledged the impact underground dance music has had on his work with Bloc Party, so it was no surprise when he dropped a couple of releases on seminal UK dance imprint Crosstown Rebels in 2013 and ‘14. Those recordings made him realise that he needed to detach listeners from the lyrical narrative and get them down “where the bass is working” – no easy task when your vocal is such an iconic one. He’s managed to do this though, while retaining pop sensibilities in the songs.

“I wasn’t making extended, open-ended club music, it was about making sure things were concise,” he summarises.

After extensively touring Bloc Party’s 2012 album Four, Okereke stepped away from rock music once more, submerging himself in club culture by playing DJ sets around the globe. During this time the themes buried in Trick began to reveal themselves.

“Because I’ve spent so much time over the last two years in clubs, I feel it’s seeped into my inspiration, just being in clubs at 3am, 4am, 5am, and being around people who are off their heads, and just soaking in that energy and atmosphere,” he explains. “That was the biggest influence for what I wanted the record to be about. Not necessarily the full on kinda party, banging feel, but the moments after, when the drugs start wearing off and people start to become edgy and introspective; I really wanted an after-hours record, something that had an element of darkness about it, but that still wasn’t so distant from the dancefloor.”

As a third-party bystander, Okereke was able to watch flirting go down from behind the decks and see pure lust play out without being a part of it. He’s channelled those interactions into Trick, resulting in a raw full-length that looks at chemical romance from the outside in.

“The record to me feels like two halves, there’s two very different sides,” he says. “There’s a pronounced sense of lust I hear in tracks like First Impressions and Coasting and My Hotel Room; the first sparks of desire between people. Then there’s also moments on songs like Humour Me and Stay The Night or Closer where that love has been withdrawn and people are clinging on to something that isn’t there anymore. To me that’s really what the record oscillates between.”