Album Review: Blur - 'The Ballad of Darren'
With fuzzy, dream-like guitars and crooning vocals, ‘The Ballad of Darren’ transports us to a world where we relearn what it means to be human.
July 21st sees UK-hailing Blur release their ninth studio album ‘The Ballad of Darren.’ Throughout the years, Blur have racked up some truly impressive streaming stats on streaming platforms such as Spotify, ‘Song 2 – 2012 Remaster’ has an incredible 702, 854, 767 streams.
The album opens with the track ‘The Ballad’ and is a song that feels like slowing down and embracing everything around us, the highs and the lows, our experiences in everyday life, but most importantly it feels like it’s a reminder to cherish what makes us human. The slow melody and crooning vocals envelope us on the first listen and transport us to the world Damon Albarn establishes in this track and sets the tone for the rest of the album wonderfully.
‘St. Charles Square’ opens with the lyrics “I’ve fucked up, I’m not the first to do it,” and it's something that anyone will be able to relate to at any time in their life. It's so easy to make mistakes in our lifetimes, mistakes that may affect our relationships with people, our careers or even just a single day of our lives. Making mistakes is all part of being human and it would be impossible to find someone who hadn’t made a mistake at least once in their life. Albarn’s easy confession of having made mistakes is almost reassuring in the knowledge that even people you or others look up to make mistakes too.
‘The Narcissist’ is the sixth track of the album and has racked up an impressive 7, 947, 506 streams on Spotify since its release as the first single for ‘The Ballad of Darren’ on May 18th, 2023. The track explores the themes of the risk of being blinded by your own ego, and how often we might not even realise that this has begun to happen to us.
Blur closes ‘The Ballad of Darren’ with ‘The Heights.’ The Track opens with dreamy sounding guitars, creating the same kind of feeling that the opening track did. This song explores the fear of running out of time, which may be applicable to so many different aspects of our lives - we, as humans, so often feel like we are constantly against the clock to achieve the things we want for ourselves.
Blur’s ‘The Ballad of Darren’ very much feels like an album that explores the different emotions and experiences that make us human, while also exploring how one experience can shape us as a person while also setting us up for another. It feels like a reminder to embrace the moments we have in our lives, both the good and the bad, and to use them to strengthen ourselves as people.
Words by Bethany Ellis
