Blur's debut album Leisure turns 35

Blur's debut album, Leisure, turns 35 this week, and a new retrospective argues it deserves more credit than it typically gets. Even Damon Albarn has called the record "awful," and it wasn't universally praised on release either; NME's Andrew Collins gave it an underwhelming six out of 10 at the time, writing that "it ain't the future."

The record captured a specific moment in British indie music, caught between two competing scenes: the fading Madchester sound out of the north and the emerging shoegaze scene from the Thames Valley, inspired by acts like My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins. That tension shows most clearly on the album's two standout singles, the dreamy, shoegaze-leaning "She's So High" and the baggy, Madchester-indebted "There's No Other Way."

The pull between those two influences continues across the rest of Leisure, with songs like "Bad Day" leaning north and "Birthday" embracing shoegaze's blissed-out atmosphere. The album's strongest moments, including "She's So High," "There's No Other Way" and the cinematic "Sing," hold up well today, even if tracks like the plodding "Wear Me Down" do not.

Leisure has struggled to attract the same attention as Blur's next two albums, Modern Life Is Rubbish and Parklife, both of which found the band more confident in its own identity. Where those records reflect a band certain of its direction, Leisure captures Blur before that certainty arrived, still finding its footing between two rival scenes.

That uncertainty is part of what makes the album worth revisiting, the retrospective argues: it offers a portrait of one of Britain's most inventive bands in a far less assured moment, before Blur became the reinventive group its later albums would reveal.