The Ballad of Darren Blur

• 1The Ballad03:36
• 2St. Charles Square03:55
• 3Barbaric04:08
• 4Russian Strings03:37
• 5The Everglades (For Leonard)02:56
• 6The Narcissist04:05
• 7Goodbye Albert04:16
• 8Far Away Island02:57
• 9Avalon03:05
• 10The Heights03:23
• Total Runtime35:58

Info for The Ballad of Darren

One of the most successful British bands of the last 3 decades, blur are back on 21st July with their first new album in over 8 years: The Ballad of Darren. Preceded by first single The Narcissist on 18th May, the album was produced by James Ford and recorded in Studio 13, London and Devon, and is the sound of a band at the very top of their game.

Produced by James Ford and recorded at Studio 13, London and Devon, The Ballad of Darren is the band’s ninth studio album, their first since the chart-topping The Magic Whip in 2015, with artwork featuring an image by British photographer Martin Parr.

While it vibrates with all sorts of echoes and aftershocks from the band’s pop pomp – an “Oi!” here, a flash of brass there – these are not songs that suggest larks back aboard the mothership, the boys reunited for one more cheery jaunt. Instead, this is a record that understands nostalgia not as comforting singalong or trophy-lift of past glories, but a tangible pain that comes with cataloguing all the people, places and selves that are shed over the years. “I just looked into my life/And all I saw was that you’re not coming back,” sings Albarn on opening song The Ballad, a versatile line of grief and regret. The willowy Johnny Marr guitars of Barbaric, meanwhile, are tempered by Albarn bleakly repeating a tightly condensed little tragedy: “I have lost the feeling/That I thought I’d never lose.” It feels fittingly adult for a band so many will have grown up with, like some real-time Britpop version of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. The Ballad Of Darren features songs that are “quite retrospective, looking back over a career, over friendships that have been long-term.” We all go hand in hand through their midlife.

The album begins with a sudden clank, the sound of something cranking back into action, as if Blur have been in suspended animation, waiting for a coin in the slot. As their individual CVs make clear – not least Albarn’s hugely successful stewardship of Gorillaz, guitarist Graham Coxon’s solo and soundtrack work, drummer Dave Rowntree’s political and legal work and bassist Alex James’s cheesemaking – that’s far from true, but the opening songs could not make it clearer that this is a Blur album. One of three tracks specifically rooted in the Super Trouper life of the working band, The Ballad can trace its roots back to The Universal or To The End, its Jim O’Rourkedoes-Bacharach grandeur collapsed in melancholy. “I met you at an early show… we travelled around the world together,” sings Coxon in response to Albarn, his backing vocals continuing a conversation that began more than four decades ago when the singer insulted his brogues in a Colchester school yard. Next, though, comes the clammy St Charles Square, the portrait in Song 2’s attic, a syphilitic Girls And Boys, an account of a paranoid breakdown that expects you to know exactly who, where and what it’s talking about (“Pauli’s ghost come back to haunt me”). A sweetheart contract between Magazine and The Soft Boys, it’s the album’s most raucous moment, a reminder of how gloriously messy Blur could always be.

Blur

Blur
as we know it was born in 1989 when the band signed to Food/EMI. Debut album Leisure (1991) announced the arrival of a band with pop suss warped by an art-punk eccentricity. Yet Blur had more in them: namely, a revolution in the sound of English popular music. Second album Modern Life Is Rubbish reintroduced the idea that English rock music could be cool, and by the time their third album Parklife emerged in 1994, the rest of the UK had caught up.

The Great Escape (1995) refined the sound palette of Britpop, but Blur were already moving on. 1997's Blur was an about-face - scuffed and noisy and un-English. Follow-up 13 was an even a more radical adventure in sound as William Orbit refereed a truce between organic punkpop and new-fangled technology.

Seventh album Think Tank (2003) was Blur’s first as a three piece after the temporary departure of founding guitarist Graham Coxon, featuring an eclectic variety of rhythms and textures and glorious melodies.

In 2009 Blur reconvened as a four-piece to play a series of UK shows including two sold out dates at Hyde Park and a historic Sunday night appearance at Glastonbury. A film about Blur, No Distance Left To Run, was released in 2010.

This album contains no booklet.