Kele – “Vandal”

Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke has announced his sixth solo album, The Flames Pt. 2, due out March 24. Along with the news is a lead single, “Vandal,” the art for which features Kele burning a copy of the Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead.

“As a British born Nigerian, that debate has made me angry,” Kele says in a statement. “It has felt like for these last few years I have been carrying around a lot of that anger, so with ‘Vandal’ I felt I needed to put it somewhere useful.”

Kele adds: “There haven’t been many things that have made me feel proud to be British recently but watching those people in Bristol pulling down the Colston statue made me feel immensely proud. It was ordinary people saying ‘no, this slaver does not represent my Britain.’ It was an act of defiance that I understood and I suddenly got a glimpse of a Britain I could believe in.”

Listen to “Vandal” below.