In the middle of 2009, mid-way through the biggest American tour of their career, Kele Okereke and his three Bloc Party alumni agreed that it was time to put a temporary full stop on band matters. A sabbatical was required. As of November, they would spend 12 months apart. It was a mutual decision. This was a major deal, over the course of three platinum records, with a transatlantic portfolio that was the envy of their peers and moving towards a sound that was assimilating the long-armed traditions of the four-piece British guitar band into shapes it had previously not imagined itself contorting into, Bloc Party were peaking.

By way of an adieu, they signed off with the peculiar measure of releasing One More Chance, a piano house record that skipped boldly onto the centre of the dance-floor. In some ways, this should have been expected. Kele had previously guested on a Chemical Brothers track. Their first album Silent Alarm, a la Janet Jackson’s Control, was commercially released in original and remixed formats. On their last full-length record Intimacy, the band had warped influences from bleeding edge American R&B, pounding techno motifs and Soundsystem dub-plates into the confines of a festival-friendly UK rock act.

Kele had intended to walk away from music for a year, to spend time catching up with himself. He began his sabbatical learning to kick-box, training hard at the gym and home-making the flat he had just bought, something he refers to as ‘the first grown up thing I had ever done.’ He simply could not leave his creative impulses alone, though. He booked time between these wholesome pursuits in the EMI recording studios at the bottom end of Tottenham Court Road.

He found the role of being primary, sole decision maker around his musical direction surprisingly to his taste. He began working with discordancy, manipulating frequencies into states he had not heard before but made their own peculiarly spatial sense. By the time he had written the freeform, cascading, Josh Wink-ish techno meltdown that constituted the second half of the song Rise, he had an emotional blueprint for what would become his first solo record, The Boxer. With this, he could do anything and everything he had ever dreamt of, condensing his bold explorations and innovations with 21st century pop music.

You don’t really get shallow with Kele. But that is not to say you do not get fun. His understanding of what he could be as a pop star (solo! Unashamed!), melting the distinctions of dance music and cerebral pop came from two unusual touchstones. For the previous twelve months before crafting The Boxer began, he had committed to a monogamous love affair with the Gary Numan album, The Pleasure Principal. The title of the record and its opening shot, the sexy call and response meter Walk Tall, sets up the stall for this cheeky, heartfelt, open record. ‘It was about putting something out there that had a sense of defiance. Training to within an inch of his life, using his body as a powerful presentational tool, became key to all this. Walk Tall was its soundtrack. For first single, the dirty club joint Tenderoni (‘it’s about pashing on somebody that is maybe a little too young for you’), peppered with dirty bass squawls and a ridiculously propulsive beat. The rest of the record is just as bold. In On The Lam he has broken into two step garage, fashioning a record with sped up vocals that owe as much to Sweet Like Chocolate as they do Alphabet Street. He sets the lover’s lament of The Other Side to a scintillating sound bed of samba house beats and driving piano. On Unholy Thoughts he tears religion apart with a coruscating line on guilt and a celestial choral breakdown into the closing cadences of All The Things I Could Never Say.

The album is marked by both its ambition and its sense of the new. For Kele Okereke, one suspects they start right now.