came about from Lissack's experimentation with effects pedals and loops. Okereke, who wrote all of the album's lyrics, based songs on a wide range of issues. "Team A" is said to be based on the New York drug scene, and "V.A.L.I.S." based on the science fiction novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick. Other songs, such as "So He Begins to Lie", were based on reality television. Promotion and release The album was officially announced in a blog post by Okereke. In the post Okereke revealed the album title and cover art and stated that the album was the best thing that the band had ever done, making note of the fact that they wanted to challenge themselves by not "relying on protools or the invisible grid that seems to be mapping out all of popular music these days." The goal of the album was to create a sound that resembled four people playing in a room, a return to the formula of their debut album Silent Alarm. The album's cover art was designed by bassist Gordon Moakes. The four circles is said to represent a different member of the band. The colour red represents Okereke, blue represents Moakes, yellow Lissack and green Tong. Reception Critical response Four received "generally favourable reviews" from critics; at Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 68 based on 34 reviews. The Observer'''s Phil Mongrendien has praised the album's "urgency" and said it bears "the sound of a band rediscovering what made them so special in the first place" While criticising the "hesitant and unpolished" slower tracks, a review by Jaime Gill on the BBC Music website remarked that Bloc Party now sound "full of potential where just four years ago they sounded depleted" and touted the record as "2012's most exciting guitar album". The album also received some more mixed reviews. Ian Cohen from Pitchfork was more critical, criticising what he calls a "revisionist history" attempt to move back to a guitar-focused sound, and saying that the band "don't have the physical stamina to properly recreate Silent Alarm." Marc Burrows of Drowned in Sound felt the record lacked "instant classics" but was "considerably more consistent, and consistently enjoyable... than either of its predecessors". Writing for The Quietus, Matthew Foster said that while the record is "laced with