It was, thought Kele Okereke, good to be home.

Bloc Party had been away, on tour, for almost two years. It had been a long time and a long way, but it was all great stuff: one million people had bought the band's debut album Silent Alarm. British music weekly NME made it their Album Of The Year in 2005. It was in the UK album charts for a thumping 69 weeks. It wasn't just the London-based four-piece's home country that fell hard for their agit-jitter guitar pop. Bloc Party - Okereke, Russell Lissack, Gordon Moakes, Matt Tong - had received similar plaudits across Europe, and in Japan. They raced up the charts in 17 countries. In America, they were the only Nu Skool Brit guitar band who could sell out 8000-capacity venues. With success like that, who wouldn't be happy?

Nonetheless, Okereke was tired: Bloc Party's frenetic pace - on stage, within songs - had propelled them, fast round the world, but it also meant their frontman felt 'too many songs were at the same emotional pitch'. He was creatively frustrated: why couldn't this mad music fan make beats and sounds like Timbaland could make beats and sounds? And Okereke was hungover: he came back to East London and partied hard how else to cope with all the changes in his life, and that the 25-year-old witnessed going on around him on the streets that he hadn't walked in so many months? And yet, and yet... When, in early 2006, it came time to call a halt to the touring and begin work on their second album, Bloc Party's frontman and lyricist was inspired - rather than suffocated - by what he felt inside, and what he saw going on around him.

All the joy + pain + freedom + chaos + success + tension + cocaine + nutjobs + racism + headless hedonism that swirled around him,, and the clubs, pubs, and pavements of his Bethnal Green home. Kele Okereke took that positivity, that negativity, that energy, and trammelled it - forced it - into a bunch of new songs.

The result: an album that is an electrifying and staggeringly direct chronicle of post-millennial Britain. Okereke's bold, honest lyrics are set to ear-meltingly invigorating music. It's guitar rock, but not as we know it. It's Bloc Party, but not as we know them.

In collaboration with producer Jacknife Lee (U2, Snow Patrol; used to be in Compulsion, is alright now), they've created an album that bristles with slashed-up riffology, chop-changing rhythms, disco-techno and vocal confidence that can only be described as on-mic operatics. You've never heard Okereke sing and sound like this. Don't worry. Neither has he.

This is A Weekend In The City, Bloc Party's all-guns-blazing war on street-level terror. "East London is a vampire that sucks the joy right out of me." 'Is it a concept album?' Kele Okereke squirms. 'I baulk a little at the word "concept". It's such a loaded term these days. But I guess there were themes running throughout the songs. I really wanted to make sure this album had a real centre. Whereas the last one didn't have a clear focus - I knew what I was aiming for a lot more with this record.'

Take SRXT. It's a hymnal, glorious song, and nowhere near as maudlin as a song named after an anti-depressant, and which discusses suicide, might be. But a blunt title begs a blunt question: is it autobiographical? 'When you write any song, you're expressing something from inside you. Thoughtful Okereke wor