Pioneers: Bloc Party's masterpiece Silent Alarm is 10

Silent Alarm is imbued with the claustrophobic tension of early twenty-first century paranoia: the dawning digital age, the burgeoning East London scene and the Iraq War all are tightly woven into the album’s fabric. It is a classic call to arms that still resonates in 2015 Britain and will continue to do so for many years.

There was very little rock n’ roll glamour about Bloc Party: four disaffected Londoners clad in jumpers and Nike Airs looked out of place in a music scene dominated by angular hair, leather jackets and pointy shoes. Looking back Silent Alarm seamlessly fits into the music narrative of the 00s, but at the time the record jarred uncomfortably with the contemporary charts. The yelps and dance rhythms that now dominate dance floors sounded alien on Radio 1 in late 2004. While Franz Ferdinand and The Libertines were simultaneously topping charts and making tabloid headlines, Bloc Party’s erratic music was making narrow inroads that would eventually generate its own scene.

Written in London and recorded in Copenhagen during 2014, Silent Alarm is an intensely angry LP. From the scattered opening rhythms of “Like Eating Glass”, to the concluding drone of “Compliments”, the album feels at odds with the world it inhabits. Friends are dull and apathetic, sex is fraught with anxiety, and the city is unrelenting. It’s a portrait of contemporary life that is eerily accurate: it feels like stepping into the internal monologue and scattered heart beats of a young person trying to shape their place in a world that is increasingly strange and unknowable.

This sobriety is balanced against moments of intense beauty. There are few more poignant songs than “This Modern Love”: Kele Okereke’s ode to fading and bewildering love is the album’s critical cornerstone. “Blue Light” and “So Here We Are” are also achingly beautiful points within an otherwise bitter track listing. The latter was a brave lead single: the chiming guitars and whispered tales about ecstasy don’t fit into any conventional pop song rulebooks.

Bloc Party didn’t need rulebooks; Silent Alarm rewrote most of them and paved the way for so much that followed in the rest of the decade. Their influence can even be seen openly in the current wave of bands championed by Steve Lamac and the NME. There would be no Alt-J without Silent Alarm.

Silent Alarm isn’t a perfect record; it doesn’t even feature the best songs Bloc Party released in 2014/2015. “Price of Gas” is dull and thumping, “Luno” is chaotic and prickly, while “She’s Hearing Voices” and “Positive Tension” never sounded half as good on record as they did live. But this record undoubtedly captured the early twenty-first century’s zeitgeist. The group’s subsequent albums were never quite able to catch the conflicting emotions that are tangled at the heart of Silent Alarm.

Ten years old but still going strong.