Always on the move, between Gorillaz (with whom he has just released Cracker Island), his solo career, The Good, The Bad & The Queen and his many collaborations, Damon Albarn manages to juggle multiple projects without ever conceding an ounce of mediocrity or approximation. Now he’s back at the helm of Blur, alongside guitarist Graham Coxon, who left the band in the mid-2000s. Eight years after the pop melodies of the light-hearted The Magic Whip, whose first recordings in Hong Kong were totally incidental - the band were stuck there following the cancellation of a Japanese festival they were due to take part in - here is the more much more serious The Ballad of Darren. The intention is very much elsewhere, the flavour of the time tastes different, more bitter than whipped cream in any case, and this time around the quartet didn’t go into the studio to kill spare time, they came with a purpose.
In December 2022, while everyone was busy with their own careers, the four former Britpop stars were offered a gig at Wembley. “You can’t say no to that.” Dave Rowntree tells Rolling Stone. “It’s the most iconic venue in the U.K, really. We certainly weren’t playing Wembley at the height of our so-called fame in the late Nineties.” It’s impossible for Damon to sit idly by when this offer is presented, so in true Damon fashion, he summons everyone into the studio with 24 tracks under his arm, written in hotel rooms during his tour with Gorillaz.
“I don’t want to put words in Damon’s mouth about what the songs are about,” adds the drummer. “But it certainly seemed to me that it was very personal, and that’s when Damon’s at his best. That kind of melancholy reflective mood that he can brilliantly evoke — there was a lot of that.” Plunged into the deep end of the singer’s melancholy, this ninth album embraces a reflective rock that is never monotonous. Dark and luminous, orchestral but also minimal, classy but also strange, it traverses opposing sounds that never clash but are always moving. This on-the-edge emotion can be appreciated from the very beginning, from the opening strains of “The Ballad” bursting with strings and piano, and climaxing at the very last minute with the vertiginous “The Heights”, whose acoustic opening is reminiscent of David Bowie’s penetrating Space Oddity.
Albarn, whose aching blues have never made his voice tremble so much, has never sung with such intensity. “Damon has really evolved as a songwriter, and as a musician, actually,” says producer James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, The Last Shadow Puppets), with whom Albarn worked on Gorillaz’s The Now Now. “He’s really wearing his heart on his sleeve on this record. It doesn’t feel like there’s any artifice there. It just feels pure and expressive. It’s a powerful record that no one saw coming, but one that will live on. As for the English band’s fans, they didn’t have to wait long to witness the Blur renaissance: the 90,000 seats at Wembley were doubly packed on the 8th and 9th of July.
