There are two sides to Blur’s sporadic reunions. There are the live shows – Glastonbury in 2009, a trawl around the world’s festivals in 2012, a global arena tour in 2015, an unexpected one-off performance at one of Damon Albarn’s Africa Express events in 2019 – which are reliably rapturously received: a chance, as Graham Coxon recently put it to “revisit all those great songs”, complete with a distinct emotional charge driven by nostalgia and the evidence that the once-fractured relationships within the band have been mended. And then there is the issue of recording and releasing new material.
By far the most adventurous band among Britpop’s big league, willing to change and push forward in a way their peers seldom were, it doesn’t fit Blur’s profile to reconstitute purely as a heartwarming exercise in nostalgia. But their actual recording process has been fraught since re-forming in 2008. Blur were reported to have made three attempts to record a new album, but only three songs emerged, as limited edition singles; Albarn apparently called time on album sessions in 2012 midway through recording, much to the chagrin of producer William Orbit. Albarn likewise suggested that the tracks recorded at impromptu 2013 sessions in Hong Kong would constitute “one of those records that never comes out”, before Coxon completed the music in secret and invited the singer to add lyrics: Albarn looked faintly surprised to be at the hastily arranged press conference that announced 2015’s acclaimed The Magic Whip.
Perhaps the issue is the weight of expectation, and not merely because of the music they made in the 90s. Blur’s two chief protagonists have pursued impressively eclectic solo paths; Albarn in particular has made a career out of refusing to stand still, so the standard reunion album practice of warming over former glories, creating a memory-jogging simulacrum of the past, won’t cut it. Under the circumstances, you can see why Blur chose to record a new album in secret, suddenly announcing it months after another set of reunion shows went on sale. Entitled The Ballad of Darren and being released on 21 July, Albarn has called it rather gnomically “an aftershock record; reflection and comment on where we find ourselves now”.
The first track to be released from it, The Narcissist, is both less understated than the singles they released in 2012, and less confounding than Go Out, the largely tune-free, feedback-drenched track that heralded the arrival of The Magic Whip. It’s also more straightforward than that album’s more experimental moments (Pyongyang or Thought I Was a Spaceman), chugging along on a two-chord Coxon riff and a metronomic, vaguely motorik rhythm track, before rising into a gently anthemic chorus. If you were forced at gunpoint to compare it to a 90s Blur single, you’d probably pick Coffee and TV.
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Sung in call-and-response style – backing vocals repeating key words and phrases from each line – the lyrics seem to find Albarn in the same kind of self-examining mode that marked his 2014 solo album Everyday Robots. They’re oblique enough to support a variety of interpretations, but one would definitely be that they concern Blur’s career. “Service stations on the road” and LSD-fuelled hi-jinks early on, shading into addiction and darkness as time wears on and a relationship with fame that becomes increasingly complicated: “I looked in the mirror, so many people standing there, I walked towards them, into the floodlights … I found my ego, I felt rebuttal.”
It’s rather affecting, particularly when the lyrical focus appears to shift to the present, and aspirations that are noticeably mellower than the vaulting ambition and hunger that fuels bands early on: “Connect us to love and keep us peaceful for a while.” That fits the song’s general tenor. It boasts an impressive sense of ease – for all the wider world knows, making it might have been as fraught a business as Blur’s previous attempts to record a new album, but it certainly doesn’t sound like a band torturing themselves to recapture something. In fact, it sounds like Blur have never been away.