The Ballad of Darren is Blur’s first album since 2015, and the band’s ninth overall.
Thirty years ago, Blur’s brazen pop set the tone for Cool Britannia, the 1990s.
Today, the lead singer of the band, Damon Albarn, considers British isolation to be decidedly unfashionable.
In the government, he said, there are “a large number of people who are irreparably tainted by Brexit and have done the country no favors.”
“They’ve made it more remote, and I believe we’ve been diminished,” he told.
According to Albarn, Brexit “has unquestionably made it more difficult to tour, but it has also diminished the value of the arts and creativity as a whole.”
Brexit has certainly not assisted this situation.
The Ballad of Darren is Blur’s first album since 2015, and the band’s ninth overall.
It will be published in July, with The Narcissist being the first single to be released this week.
It sounds like someone gazing back, and it is distinctly a Blur album.
Blur was founded in 1988, but it was not until several years later that they achieved international fame with albums such as Modern Life Is Rubbish in 1993 and Parklife in 1995.
In their adolescence, their competition with Oasis for the number one spot was a marketing and tabloid goldmine, and their music was the soundtrack of a generation.
Since then, entire genres have come and gone, and three decades have passed since the release of their debut album.
They can afford a perspective of middle age.
Before thirty years ago, there was no internet, Albarn notes.
“Thirty years ago, no one had even conceived of social media…Politically, things were very different thirty years ago… People weren’t concerned about climate change 30 years ago…”
Why then set a new record?
Albarn responded, “It’s a good question, and perhaps when people listen to it they will say exactly that: why did they bother making more music?”
“It’s nobody’s business if you need to produce music or be creative,” said guitarist Graham Coxon.
It is no one’s concern.
