blur Release Brand New Track ‘St. Charles Square’
With just over a week to go until blur take the stage for two unmissable shows at Wembley Stadium, the band have dropped St. Charles Square, the latest track to be released from their highly-anticipated brand new album The Ballad of Darren, out 21st July on Parlophone.
“I fucked up, I’m not the first to do it.” – St. Charles Square
The opening line of St. Charles Square is already firmly established as a crowd favourite, with audiences enthusiastically roaring along with Damon Albarn as the band blaze their new songs across Europe this summer. The song’s chorus recalls the discordant art-pop swagger of earlier work and sees Albarn queasily exclaim “cause there’s something down here, and it’s living under the floorboards” encircled by backing vocals that compound the sense of encroaching peril and a quintessentially marauding guitar turn from Graham Coxon.
Eight years since their chart-topping album The Magic Whip (2015), blur made a surprise return 6 weeks ago with the release of The Narcissist, racking up over 10m global streams – and counting – with a song which The Guardian (4/5 stars) describes as sounding like “…Blur have never been away”. Blur were most definitely back the moment Damon Albarn, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree burst onto the stage for an electric live return at their first warm-up and first-ever show at Colchester Arts Centre in Essex on 19th May. With further shows in Eastbourne, Wolverhampton and Newcastle and now on the road in Europe, blur will have already performed their iconic and much-loved songs – along with new tracks The Narcissist and St. Charles Square – to more than 2 million ecstatic fans across Europe by the time they take stage for their first-ever Wembley Stadium shows in London in just over a week.