Prior to the release of The Ballad of Darren, Damon Albarn described Blur’s ninth album as “a record that sort of delves into what it’s like to be 55”. But it seems more universal than that, drenched in the horror of realising that time has passed and continues to pass. There’s mourning for the years you’ve already lived and the feelings you’ve long since felt, and anxiety for the years and feelings yet to come. It seems to say that life is long until it’s not, that love is safe until it’s not, that the world is easy to exist in until it’s not: realisations that dawn again and again even in your younger years. Blur have always been capable of balancing tender introspection with lairy pop tunes and The Ballad of Darren, swooning and seasoned, is one of their very best.
In a year peppered with guitar-heavy albums that deal in very real mid-life grief – Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters – Blur’s is a less specific, softer focus kind of anguish. For much of the record Albarn sings in his lower register like a washed-up lounge act, deep and simple and full of gorgeous regret. It makes lyrics that look like adolescent poetry on the page sound deeply profound: “I just looked out to the point / Where the words, they are hitting me / In a full-on assault,” he sings on opener The Ballad, a mirror ball-dappled, end-of-night lament. The peppy Barbaric is an exercise in denial – it reads like devastation and sounds like a day at the beach. Russian Strings is the most beautiful song you’ll ever hear about the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Relationships end, selves are reassessed, goodbyes are said and the future is eyed warily.
It’s a brief album – 10 tracks, 36 minutes – and by all accounts it came together quickly. Though it doesn’t feel rushed, you can feel that gush of inspiration in the twisting of instruments around each other. There’s a hint of Bowie, a brushstroke of latter-day Arctic Monkeys and a sense of the psychic connection of four musicians drawing on decades of history – it’s a flattering juxtaposition to the collage of ideas assembled from studio scraps that made up 2015’s The Magic Whip. Graham Coxon’s natural inclination for chunkier guitars and punkier riffs is largely tempered as he dances between couplets and acts as a bit of a foil to Albarn’s introspection.
The B-word has hung heavy over Blur for decades. As a band, they are repelled by the era that they came to typify and set a bomb under it with increasingly esoteric albums and side-projects. But the relatively raucous St Charles Square tips its cap at that old oi-oi mentality: “’Cause every generation has its gilded posers”, after all, while The Narcissist is something like an apology for the youthful arrogance of the rockstar, its backing vocals sounding for all the world like the angel on Albarn’s shoulder feeding him lines. For the first time, maybe, Blur have found a balance that gently lays Britpop to rest.
It must be hard to be a band that has been so beloved. You want to think that the work you are doing now, in your 50s, is your best, while thousands of people remain in thrall to the songs you wrote when you were 25 – one of which was a joke that got out of hand. After some missteps along the way, Blur find something of their old selves in a new space and time on The Ballad of Darren, an album that adds to the lore without ever taking anything from it. Maybe this is what middle age is all about: accepting the painful past, eyeing the inevitable end of everything and striding out into the future regardless.
