Bloc Party

"I think if you set out to innovate, that's quite contrived in itself, but with us, the principle we always had was not to repeat ourselves, and always try and do something new with each song," Bloc Party bass player Gordon Moakes tells me from his London home on the eve of the British art-rockers most expansive Australian tour. "If we've heard it before in one of our own songs, we always think, 'well, we don't need to do this again'. I think that was just the way we always approached it - does it appease that kind of instinct in us each time, you know?"

Moakes is talking about the band's new record, 'Intimacy', which was released digitally in August, and took physical form this month. He's responding to my observation that nobody could accuse the band of stagnation - for the third time, Bloc Party have released an album bigger and bolder than what was expected of them, pushing the limits of indie-rock, post-punk and dance music to constantly stay one step ahead of their imitators.

In the background, I can hear the noises of a newly born baby - Moakes took time off from the band shortly after the recording of 'Intimacy' to have his first child, and has just recently returned to the fold to tour the record.

"Anyone who's had a baby will probably know that it's quite intense," he explains. "You need to sort of have a break from it. My wife doesn't have the luxury of being able to get away from the baby, but I've been able to kind of have a week away and then come back and be fresh to help her out. It's a bit of a wrench, but we seem to be getting the balance right at the moment."

Today, however, Moakes is at home for a day of interviews and promotion, and despite Bloc Party having a prickly reputation when it comes to the press, he is nothing short of warm and approachable.

"None of us like talking to people who haven't really got much to say or any ideas or anything, but that's true in life, not just interviews!" he laughs.

And there's certainly a lot to say about 'Intimacy' - love it or hate it, it's a tour de force of ideas that come thick and fast at a listener who may have been lulled into a false sense of security by the introspective concept album that was last year's 'A Weekend In The City'. From the first two tracks - the thunderous Ares, and the electronic mayhem of lead single Mercury - it's clear that there's something very different going on here.

"It's very hard for me to be objective about how the record sounds," Moakes considers. "It's not inviting you to try and link the songs so much, in the way that the last record did. I remember doing interviews about 'A Weekend In The City', where I said, 'well, it begins on a Friday night, and as you go through the record it takes you through the weekend'. That's a stretch anyway, but certainly with this record we're not asking that of our audience. We're just saying, 'here's the songs we recorded this year, we think they form a cohesive portrait of where we are right now', but beyond that there's no concept.

"The one thing that we were gonna do differently was just say that the guitars aren't going to be a starting point necessarily for songs. Signs [a rich ballad that evokes early tracks like This Modern Love], that was one where all we had essentially was a chord progression, four notes or something, and we just kind of built it up with all the different sounds that are on there. I mean, the danger of doing it that way is you don't know where you're going, and you start putting things on that you don't really know if you need or not, but I think we were quite disciplined about it. You end up with a different aesthetic, and that was very much what we were after."

As the band prepares to hit our stages, the question on everyone's mind is, of course, how do you translate a song like Mercury, replete with stabbing horn sections and all manner of electronic manipulation, to a rock show?

"I don't know...I mean, I do know actually," Moakes laughs. "At heart we are a rock band, and you can't really take that out of us. I think making this record was a real sort of experiment of approaching a record in a completely different way. We weren't really thinking about how we would do it live, at that point, but when it came to it, it was the four of us in our rehearsal space going, 'okay, how do we do this?' With Mercury, the horns are so important, and yet you can't just play along to a backing track for the whole song. So I loaded those sounds into a little sampler which I trigger, and some of those horn parts have been transposed for guitar, and so it becomes a new beast. The rock energy that we've always had as a band is something that we can't help but bring to those songs when we do them live, however we decide to interpret them."

Matt Vesely

Bloc Party play at Thebarton Theatre on Sunday 23 November.

'Intimacy' is out now through Shock