BLUR, “The Ballad of Darren.”

Damon Albarn recently described The Ballad of Darren as “an aftershock record.” The long gaps between albums certainly make new Blur music feel like a seismic event. After all, it’s been eight years since 2015’s The Magic Whip, and 20 years since its predecessor, Think Tank. This time, Blur is back with a collection of songs that explore loss and mourning with Albarn at his most vulnerable. But there’s another fault line running through this album: joy.

“The Ballad” opens the album with Albarn’s broken heart fully exposed on his sleeve as he sings, “I just looked into my life/ And all I saw was that you’re not coming back,” over a bleak piano and drum machine arrangement that slowly evolves into an emotional and epic arrangement.

Later, the familiar tearjerking string arrangement that Blur has relied on for decades shows up right on time. It may not aim as high as “The Universal,” but what it lacks in stadium anthems it more than makes up for in raw intimacy. Albarn and Graham Coxon shine on the call-and-response chorus, trading lines that evoke two friends recalling their first meeting and what it led to.

“I met you at an early show/ We traveled ‘round the world together,” they sing.

“St Charles Square” is Darren at its most raucous. Coxon embodies Carlos Alomar circa Bowie’s Scary Monsters album, dive-bombing the track repeatedly with some of the most thrilling and inventive guitar runs on any Blur album, past or present. It’s a song about fear complete with screams and callouts to basements, ghosts and things “living under the floorboards.” But it’s clear that despite the topic, the band is having a blast. This type of sheer joy hasn’t shown up on a Blur album in decades.

Just when your “Favorite Blur Songs” playlist gets reshuffled by “St Charles Square.” along comes “Barbaric” to blow your pantheon up all over again. For Blur historians, the closest touchstone is “Coffee & TV.” Should the band release this as a single, it’ll be the best one since that song. When Albarn sings the hook, “You have lost the feeling that you thought you’d never lose,” you can all but hear a stadium of Blur fans singing along.

Not content to open the album with three near-masterpieces, Blur piles on with the magnificent “Russian Strings.” The song has a world-weary Albarn vocal ruminating on mortality and coping with grief via travel, headphones and “hitting the hard stuff.” Yes, yet more melancholy, but you can imagine the sun breaking through the clouds by way of Coxon’s playful solo that takes the song to its conclusion.

There are a few songs that might have felt at home on one of Albarn’s solo albums. “The Everglades” and “Far Away Island” aren’t bad songs, but they suffer a bit from being surrounded by the towering achievements of “The Narcissist” and the side 2 highlights of “Goodbye Albert” and “Avalon.”

Throughout the album, Albarn reckons with the grief of losing too many of his close friends and musical collaborators over the last few years, and it’s hard not to graft on the collective sadness of living through the pandemic onto the doom that runs through Darren. The band remains true to that vision throughout but despite the subject matter, this album feels more like four friends rediscovering themselves and each other, and making something beautiful.

Blur drummer David Roundtree recently described the joy of making The Ballad of Darren to Rolling Stone, saying “Everything we tried… worked.”

He’s not wrong.

Follow Skott Bennett at Twitter.com/skottbennett.