The Magic Whip

In May 2013 Blur were due to play the Tokyo Rocks festival in Japan. The festival was cancelled and the band were stranded in Hong Kong for an extra five days, so they worked on new material at Avon Studios. In July 2014 Albarn said he was not sure the music would ever come out.

In November 2014 Coxon went back to the recordings with Stephen Street while Albarn was touring his solo album Everyday Robots. Coxon secretly invited James and Rowntree to further sessions, then played the results to Albarn. Albarn stopped in Hong Kong again in December for lyrical inspiration, vocals were finished in late January 2015, and mastering was completed on 18 February, the day before the album was announced in London's Chinatown.

It was released in the UK on 27 April 2015, with Warner Bros releasing it in the US the next day, the first Blur album under that label in North America. It was the band's sixth UK number one, was certified Gold, and reached 24 in the US. Tony Hung, who made the video for Go Out, designed the cover, which shows an ice cream cone with the words blur and magic whip in Chinese. Hung said Albarn described the title as an ice cream in the UK, a firework in China and a whip in a political sense. Metacritic gives it 81. Rolling Stone's David Fricke gave it four stars and called it a dark, seductive set, and Pitchfork gave it 7.0.