(Credits: Far Out / Bloc Party)
Sun 9 November 2025 8:00, UK
In the music video for Bloc Party’s ‘The Prayer’, the band is seen half-asleep, lounging on couches in London’s Café 1001, unfazed as partygoers hook up, drink and dance around them.
The four-piece appears stuck in their own minds, almost pained to be surrounded by a heady world of drugs and partying, eventually succumbing to sleep, falling victim to the song’s underlying drone over its dominant, discordant drum beat.
Written by singer Kele Okereke, the track is about begging to be seen, heard and viewed beyond the confines of shyness and doubt. Appearing on Bloc Party’s second studio album, 2007’s A Weekend in the City, ‘The Prayer’ was not their first to contrast their brand of rock-electronica with lyricism of personal reckoning, but it was one of the first times when Okereke felt the words come to him most naturally.
“It’s weird, all these lyrics, save this one, I agonised over for month and months and months,” he reflected, “Whereas this one started off with a different feel, perspective. Garrett [producer Jackknife Lee] really encouraged me to try and do something that wasn’t quite so meticulous.”
‘The Prayer’ drips with irony, with lyrics such as “Tonight make me unstoppable / And I will charm, I will slice / I will dazzle them with my wit” sung with a hint of optimism that is overtaken by dread. There is a yearning to become someone else entirely, to trade places with someone more charismatic, in place of one’s own reclusiveness, with the song then becoming a plea for escape, disguised as a dance tune.
Uncompromising in their musicianship, Bloc Party crafted a tune that expertly mimics the feeling of being trapped in a club trance, or in your own mind (two sides of the same coin, perhaps), for which Okereke found inspiration from a surprising source: rapper Busta Rhymes.
In an interview on the Album Chart Show, the musician said, “I was watching the video to ‘Touch It’ while recording the album, and it starts with these majorettes doing a stamp pattern, and it goes into the song. I thought it was a really great idea and I was toying with that while recording the record, the sort of stamp formation pattern, and we wrote the song around it.”
The drum patterns heard in both ‘The Prayer’ and ‘Touch It’ have a similar, infectious impact, eventually engraving in the mind. Both are masterfully simplistic, an approach that Okereke consciously wanted to achieve when composing, noting, “I wanted it to be something that would move people on to the dancefloor but in a real throwaway way. I think there’s great validity in telling people that you don’t have to try and over-intellectualise everything. With ‘The Prayer,’ I was trying not to think.”
Rather than overthinking what poured out, his words became a vulnerable display of himself, reckoning with his band’s sudden stardom and maintaining his individuality in the process, ruminating, “There’s something really bold there. Something really… not us! We’re seen as a polite and serious band. But I wanted to do something that wasn’t about that at all”.
‘The Prayer’ is one of Bloc Party’s greatest displays of what they achieve best: songs that allow you to lose yourself in them while holding up a mirror.
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