Bloc Party

Silent alarm

Kele Okereke and Russell Lissack met in London in 1998 at different schools and reconnected at Reading Festival in 1999, deciding to form a band. They went through the names Union, The Angel Range and Diet before settling on Bloc Party in September 2003, a play on block party; MusicBrainz dates the group to August 1999, NME to 2002 and the Wikipedia infobox to 2003. Gordon Moakes joined from an NME advert and Matt Tong on drums in 2002. A demo of "She's Hearing Voices" reached Alex Kapranos and Steve Lamacq, who played it and invited them to a live session, and they signed with Wichita in April 2004.

Silent Alarm (February 2, 2005) reached 3 in the UK and won NME's best album, and the band has sold over three million albums. A Weekend in the City (January 24, 2007, produced by Garret "Jacknife" Lee) reached 2 in the UK and 12 in the US. Intimacy followed on August 21, 2008 as a digital release through the band's website, with three days' notice and the code name Plan X, and a physical release on October 24. They paused in October 2009, reunited in September 2011 for Four (August 20, 2012, Frenchkiss, UK 3), and Tong left in 2013 and Moakes in 2015. Justin Harris and Louise Bartle came in 2015, with Hymns (January 29, 2016), Alpha Games (April 29, 2022) and The High Life EP (July 21, 2023); Harry Deacon replaced Harris in 2023.

They toured Silent Alarm in full in 2018 and 2019, and a seventh album produced by Trevor Horn, Anatomy of a Brief Romance, is dated September 11, 2026. Bloc Party received the Ivor Novello Outstanding Song Collection award in May 2025, and played an NPR Tiny Desk concert published July 15, 2025. Okereke made the solo album The Boxer in 2010, and the Chemical Brothers collaborated with him on "Believe". Setlist.fm lists 1,165 setlists.