Bloc Party's newest collection of songs, A Weekend in the City, is a stunning, intense and brilliant follow-up to their celebrated debut, Silent Alarm. A Weekend in the City is inspired by lead singer Kele Okereke's interest in what he calls the living noise of a metropolis. On Weekend, the band captures every detail from the ebullient to the mundane of daily life in a modern city, and the quiet desolation that suffuses everything from commuting to casual sex, from going out on a Friday night to the long ride home near the early hours of the morning. These are songs desperate to understand the meaning that pulses under the moments of our every day; they're bursting with tension, paranoia, sadness, love, and an intense need for reasons as to how city life has become so displacing. Not since Radiohead's OK Computer has a British band explored the diseased state of modernity so completely.