★★★★☆

Get up, get on up, they feel like being an Essex machine. Again.

Towards the end of May (the coronational month which meant that, for 2023 only, bank holidays don’t, as their canonical lyric had it, ‘come six times a year’), Blur reconvened in their old monkey-booted stomping ground.

On a sunny Friday evening, the band were in Colchester, where three-quarters of them spent their teenage years. Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Dave Rowntree and Dorset boy Alex James were kicking off their reunion run (their latest, after previous comebacks in 2009 and 2015) with a first show in eight years. The gig venue was the 400-capacity Colchester Arts Centre, scene of a show by an early, not-quite-quorate proto-Blur (Idle Vice, Rowntree’s teenage band with Coxon). This time round, it was the opening night of a four-date, club-sized English tour, the cobweb-shaking preamble to a summer of international arena and festival shows.

First, though, a press conference in one of the Essex town’s premier historical attractions. ‘It was billed as a warm-up and it’s turned into a global news event. No pressure!’ puffed James, cheerfully, as the four members lined up on a low stage. Rowntree was even less thrilled at being back back back in such a manner, albeit specifically at Colchester Castle, number-one contender for ‘the most boring school trip’. Albarn, though, appropriately enough, stood up for this well-preserved ancient monument: visiting here was ‘transformational in my love of history, so thank you very much Colchester Castle’.

Still, the gathering of some two-dozen international media was entirely their fault. The previous day, Blur revealed the existence of a new album, The Ballad Of Darren, teasing its contents with the release of a single, ‘The Narcissist’. It’s a comforting, very 90s reminder of Albarn’s easy way with a moody pop song, that paint’s-still-wet comeback being sent into the world just eight days after it was fully finished.

That ‘spontaneity’, said Albarn, really appealed; although when James playfully pointed out that said spontaneity only took eight years (the period since their last album, The Magic Whip), Albarn’s truculence simmered. The brains behind Gorillaz, solo projects galore and The Good, The Bad & The Queen, has been rather busy, you know.

Some of that busyness occasioned the creation of Blur’s ninth album. Albarn mostly wrote the ten songs during Gorillaz’ autumn 2022 tour of North America. Bedrooms, backstages and hotel conference rooms were his playpen, the ideal at-several-removes context in which to dream up a Blur comeback. ‘The only way I really could do this was totally divorced from all the import that making a new record would have,’ he explained. ‘I wanted to just not think about it and write from the heart.’ That feeling was maintained back in the UK, when Blur ‘literally just crashed into the studio’ with James Ford, the Arctic Monkeys producer who’d previously worked with Gorillaz and Cox’s band The Waeve, and thereby a ‘dream co-conspirator’.

That ease (and no little unease) is all over The Ballad Of Darren, which Albarn has described as ‘an aftershock record, reflection and comment on where we find ourselves now’. It opens with the Bontempi beat-driven nominative determinism of ‘The Ballad’, Albarn’s first words being, ‘I just look to my life and all I saw was that you’re not coming back.’ ‘Far Away Island’ is a drifting, synth-and-keys-drenched lament, Julee Cruise by way of Joe Meek. And it ends with ‘The Heights’, a Neil Young-doing-country farewell to someone or something, which climaxes in an onrushing wave of feedback and static.

‘I feel Iike I’m fairly direct emotionally on this record; for me,’ Albarn said at the castle, but declined to clarify those themes. ‘I prefer people to listen to it and draw their own conclusions. I find it quite constricting, saying, “this song is about this”.’ He will say that the Darren of the title track is a real person, a longstanding member of the band’s inner circle who’s been asking Albarn for 25 years to finish a song about him. Some people have imagined that Darren is Banksy (he isn’t) but he is real. ‘The song isn’t really about him, although he’s referenced in it. But it seemed the perfect summary of what the record is about. Somehow.’

That night in Colchester, Blur began with another new one, ‘St Charles Square’, its first line part shrug, part confession: ‘I fucked up’. Hearing its gonzo guitar chug in the studio was the moment James thought, ‘oh my god, we’re back’. The bassist was even roused from his preferred studio playing mode (supine on the sofa) to actually stand up. ‘I had a little moment, and jumped up and down, and kinda lost it. It was wonderful.’

Elsewhere on the album, the perky bounce of ‘Barbaric’ belies a chorus lyric that also speaks of a midlife wilderness: ‘I have lost the feeling that I thought I’d never lose, now where am I going?’ That sense of a man, or a country, adrift (physically, emotionally, existentially) is shot through the laconic tempo of ‘Russian Strings’, the folky elegance of ‘The Everglades’, and the woozy elegy that is ‘Goodbye Albert’. Dislocation, dislocation, dislocation.

That feeling is there, too, in the sleeve art, based on a Martin Parr photograph. This is Gourock lido and its heroic lone swimmer’s moment in the (partly obscured) sun. In Colchester, Albarn dropped another breadcrumb, saying the image is a ‘pretty good signifier of what is to come on the record’. As Rowntree added, ‘there’s quite a bit about that image which is about overcoming some sort of physical situation, and there’s something about the safety of this lido when it’s . . . right next to the sea . . . there are stories of this place where this guy will go down and exercise and there will be sharks that have been washed in by the sea.’

Or, as the swimmer himself, Ian Galt, said in a 2014 interview, ‘people do occasionally get bombed by seagull poo, especially while they’re eating their sandwiches.’ The peak 90s Blur of ‘Girls & Boys’ this is not. But in an inventive, intriguing, occasionally troubling and always thought-provoking way, middle-aged Blur it very much is.

The Ballad Of Darren is out on Parlophone Records tomorrow.