Intimacy by Bloc Party

Intimacy, Bloc Party's third album, was knocked out in two weeks in 2008 across London and Kent, with Paul Epworth and Jacknife Lee producing and Olympic Studios among the stops. The band dropped it online as a download from their own website on 21 August, barely promoting it at home, and Wichita put out the CD on 24 October.

Kele Okereke, Russell Lissack, Gordon Moakes and Matt Tong wanted to get further away from the standard guitar-band setup, and you can hear them tearing it up: electronic beats, samples and skittering, off-kilter arrangements crowd in around Lissack's guitars. Okereke built the songs loosely around one of his own breakups from 2007, so the jitter is emotional as much as sonic. "Mercury", "Talons" and "One Month Off" were the singles. Critics split over the rushed release and the heart-on-sleeve subject, calling it either brave or a misstep, but it made number 8 in the UK and 18 on the Billboard 200.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.