A Weekend in The City - Promotion and Release

Promotion and Release

One thing that we've learnt from touring over the last two years is that there are other ways to be powerful whilst making music, rather than being completely full on, 100 miles per hour. We learnt so much about the power of arrangements. I know it sound cheesy, but I guess it is going to be a more grown up Bloc Party.

Kele Okereke, on Bloc Party's musical evolution up to 2007 and its audible results on A Weekend in the City

Bloc Party confirmed a preliminary track list of 13 songs in August 2006; this included future bonus tracks "England" and "We Were Lovers". A low-quality rip of A Weekend in the City was leaked in November and showed a track list of 11 songs. Wichita Recordings did not comment, but the band members were quoted as being worried about a reduction in the potential impact of the album's content and sales. Bloc Party started a promotional tour of North America the same month with Panic! at the Disco, but cut it short after three concerts when Tong suffered a collapsed lung. The focus was changed to interviews throughout the world to explain the album's stylised lyrics and composition in the run-up to its release.

Final tweaks on the album were completed in December 2006 in London. A high-quality version was leaked in January 2007 and its contents were confirmed by Okereke. Journalists who obtained an official copy of the album's final mix suggested that it featured electronically tampered rock soundscapes in the vein of Radiohead, New Order, and Björk. Bloc Party previewed A Weekend in the City in its entirety on 24 January 2007 at the Bournemouth Old Firestation, a performance which coincided with the Japanese release of the album. The first single, "The Prayer", was released on 29 January. The band performed at a special BBC Radio 1 showcase at Maida Vale Studios on 30 January as a precursor to a February promotional tour of the UK.

The album was released in the rest of the world in the first week of February. The title comes as a tangent to the central theme of the album, "the living noise of a metropolis". The cover art is part of A Modern Project by German photographer Rut Blees Luxemburg, famous for her night cityscapes of London and for the cover art of The Streets' Original Pirate Material. The photograph is an aerial image of London's Westway, which shows the road and the adjacent sports pitches lit by the sodium glow of street lamps, and was chosen because the band believed "it was important we captured London breathing". Luxemburg has explained that "in this picture you can see how intricately and optimistically public space in the city is shared".