If you were surprised when Bloc Party released their third album Intimacy earlier this month, well, so were we - and we put it out. We caught up with frontman Kele Okereke before the sudden release to talk about the band's songwriting process and even he didn't spill the beans.

Is there a lot of pressure going into your next record considering how successful Silent Alarm and A Weekend In The City have both been?
I don't think so because since Silent Alarm was our first record and we didn't really know what to expect. We feel the most pressure recording the third record because we know how things work and we realize we have to prove ourselves again. But that's not a bad thing, that's just the thing about releasing records: it's never easy and it shouldn't ever be easy, you should be pushing yourself all the time.

Do you have any ideas for your next record yet?
Yeah, we're the kind of band who likes to write on the road and that's something that I'm really thankful about because as a band we can shut out the pressures of touring and take long soundchecks. Touring is fun, but I really get off on the idea of making music--and if we couldn't do it until we stopped touring then things would take a lot longer. I'm really impatient as it is.

What direction do you see with the new stuff?
Right now it's going very different ways. With the single 'Mercury,' we intentionally didn't write any music, we just went into the studio and wrote it there, which might be why it has sort of an unnatural, surreal feel to it. The main thing is we didn't want to write the songs again in a different key. We wrote a lot of music while we were touring on A Weekend In The City, so now we're just sifting through it in order to make a well-rounded record.

Do you generally write entire songs or do you come up with a bunch of parts that you piece together later?
You can always start things out with a drumbeat or a riff and add parts around it and build it up, but the way we generally work is by writing to a template and throwing it together to see how it sticks. We're very logical with the way we write, but with our next record we're going to try to get away from that because now that I'm aware of it, I'm going to try to do the opposite. You have to keep challenging the way you create things or you end up stagnating.

Do lyrics come at the end or are you always working on them?
It's two separate things. I always write the lyrics myself and then I set them to the music while we're recording it, so they're completely separate until the end. You have an idea of what the tone of the lyrics are and what sort of song it shouldn't be rather than what kind of song it should be. There are lots of instances in A Weekend In The City where we were changing the lyrics until the last minute and seeing what fit best.

What's been inspiring you lyrically lately?
I've been getting into reading poetry lately like Walt Whitman and EE Cummings. I always struggled with [poetry] when I was at school, because you have to have a certain temperament to get the abstractions sometimes. It didn't come easy, but now I'm excited about it again.