I was caught off guard when Bloc Party announced that they would release a digital-only album, with just three days notice. I had been ignoring them for too long. Silent Alarm will always be in rotation, but A Weekend in the City was hit and miss for me. I'd heard a few new things from them; "Flux", which I loved instantly, showed a promising new direction for them, and "Mercury", a jittery and restless single that took a while to grow on me. Eventually though, I was hooked.

But "Mercury" was immediately dismissed as a mere experiment. The overwhelming consensus, from what I read, was that Bloc Party needed to abandon their beeps and glitches and get back to making politically fueled , angular rock. But this new Bloc Party intrigued me. I downloaded Intimacy when it came out, listened a few times, and then moved on to something else. Nothing immediately stood out to me. When the CD i had ordered arrived in the mail, it took me a few weeks to go back to it and give it a better listen. Then it all clicked.

Intimacy begins with "Ares", which starts off with an ethereal sound before dissvoling into a start-stop guitar that sounds like Bloc Party decided to throw their guitars through a tree shredder, all while being accompanied by war drums. Believe it or not, it works. An abrupt key change in the middle of the song threatens to throw it all off course, but when the guitars kick back into gear its musical assault on your ears continues unabated and sends you reeling once again. "We dance to the sound of sirens" is a beautiful, apocalyptic lyric that wouldn't sound completely out of place in a nuclear-war movie.

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But Bloc Party has always had strange lyrics. The aforementioned "Mercury" begins with "My mercury's in retrograde", which, while I have no idea what it could possibly mean, sounds like a pretty serious condition to be in. However, it also sounds damn cool when backed up by a pounding bass line that almost killed my car's stereo when I played it. "Mercury" is also where the main themes of Intimacy come into play: love, rejection, heartbreak. When Kele Okereke sings "When I saw you last night, I wanted to say / 'Run away with me, away from the cynics / That this could be the start of something truly real' / But all that I could say was hey" it's the voice of a man being torn apart by loneliness and frustration. "Trojan Horse" follows along similar lines, getting over an awkward starting line ("You used to take your watch off before we made love / you didn't want to share our time with anyone"? Come on Bloc Party...) to end strongly. "You know I still adore you / but things have kind of changed" is a reluctant admittance that things have gone wrong when they shouldn't have. It ends with an absolutely furious guitar solo that sounds both like a personal exorcism through music and a swarm of wasps.