A Weekend in the City is as atypical in the realm of NME-approved 21st-century British post-punk as Bloc Party's singer is among his more profane and boisterous peers. Conceived by Okereke as a thematically linked song-cycle about, he says, "the way modern life seems to steal experience away from us," the album is far more complex, varied, and emotive than their excellent 2005 debut, Silent Alarm.

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And so he set about trying to articulate a distinctly metropolitan malaise: How we zombie-walk the subways in a cocoon of numbness; how the drudgery of work swallows our best years; how we obliterate ourselves with alcohol or drugs on weekends because, as Okereke says, "we need to throw ourselves into something so consuming we won't notice how empty our lives are."

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Okereke also felt it was also important to include tracks such as the sweet, drowsy love song "Sunday," to offset the tone of disillusionment that suffuses the rest of the album. "I think what I'm ultimately trying to say," Okereke muses, his eyes trained on the drifting blanket of white outside the window, "is...crumbs...the answer in life isn't going to be found in material things or entertaining distractions, but in feeling genuinely linked to another human being. We have to make sure that we never forget to communicate."