Only a minor point, but this track is labelled both ‘Pioneers’ or ‘The Pioneers’ depending on what issue of Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm you have. When the animated music video was getting its airtime on MTV2 back in the day, it was always shown as the former and that’s how I’ve always come to recognise. It’s probably not a note to even think about for more than a millisecond. But there are some people out there who would. Either way you look at it, it would still be the song talked about today, here and now.

I can sort of remember being alive and kicking in the Silent Alarm era. ‘Helicopter’ was the first track of the band’s that I witnessed I think in 2004, check out the post on that for more information, and then ‘Banquet’ came around some time after. Then eventually ‘Pioneers’ was released, and it was another great representative in the string of great singles that Bloc Party were coming out with at the time. Being nine years old going on ten, fair to say I wasn’t in the know of how well-acclaimed the whole album was by fans and critics alike. Thus the album wasn’t something I requested, for reasons I’m not really sure of, thinking about it now. But at the very least I knew that their singles were always good.

Kele Okereke sings in a range that I can only try to reach and does so from the moment he begins the first verse, never letting up until the calming bridge. If only the vocal melody wasn’t so catchy and memorable, it would put my cords under a lot less stress. Same applies to Matt Tong’s pounding drums, which never fully divert from the same tom-tom based pattern for the majority of the song. The title of the song doesn’t appear in the lyrics, but they very much intend to capture thoughts, feelings, beliefs and ideas that people may hold when setting out on an adventure, testing out a new theory or invention, heck, writing a new song. The lyrics detail the number of possibilities that can be taken into consideration, with the reassuring message that all you need is time to figure things out. They recount the overwhelming sensations that one can feel just by setting out on these creative endeavours. It’s a song of optimism and a sense of pride that as life goes on, these ambitious types will always be out there trying to follow in the footsteps of the great minds who have scratched their names into the fabric of time. There’s also a use of the phrase ‘so here we are’, which happens to be the title of another track from the same album. But that’s for another day.