ITS official release has only just occurred but already it feels like the story behind the gestation of The Magic Whip, Blur’s eighth and most anticipated record yet, has been cast into the storied vaults of British rock and roll folklore.

Enjoying a bit of downtime in Hong Kong on the Asia leg of their 2013 reunion tour, the band took the decision to eschew the ding-dings and humid climes of the Kowloon sprawl and instead hole up in the city’s exclusive Avon Studios for some rehearsal time. If Damon Albarn was initially ambivalent regarding the fruitfulness of the sessions (“we just went in there and knocked about loads of ideas but didn’t really get anything finished”), his tune had changed by the time Graham Coxon and Stephen Street exhumed and tinkered with the recordings upon return to England a year on (“they played it to me and I thought, ‘oh no, this is really good’).

With Coxon and Street providing the legwork on the instrumental front, Albarn fulfilled his side of the bargain by returning to the Pearl of the Orient over Christmas to pen lyrics – a process he compared tenuously to Bowie’s Berlin period. The end up is Blur’s most mature and brilliantly all-encompassing Blur-like album yet. One which straddles both the bands signature quirks and restless elan-vital. Terra firma between old and new. Sophisticated Asian poise and playful Britpop irreverence. 13 meets The Great Escape.

With its punchy chords, blithe whistles, la la la choruses and esoteric Cockney lyrics, no better is said irreverence captured than on opening track ‘Lonesome Street’, the first to feature Coxon since 1999 and one he describes as “sounding a bit like you’re careering from a night of chaos.” If the song itself evokes familiarity and a certain sense of 90’s nostalgia, the fact it was recently described as “fucking great” by Noel Gallagher serves as a reminder that these are very different times.

‘Go Out’, the most polarising of the three tracks to be drip fed pre-release, harks to 1997’s America inspired self-titled album with its buzzing feedback, splattered riffs and distressed coda – in part inspired by a feeling of agoraphobia brought on by one of the world’s most densely populated cities.

Gentler moments manifest on ‘New World Towers’ and ‘Thought I Was a Spaceman’, the former the most evocative of Albarn’s work with The Good, The Bad and The Queen as he paints an image of western desolation backed by some understated piano, cherry blossom arpeggios and a typically insouciant Alex James bassline. Where the aforementioned are reflective, downright sadness comes through on band relationship retrospective ‘My Terracotta Heart’ with Albarn almost audibly choking up over lines such as “I’m lost and feeling that I don’t know if I’m losing you again”, the sentiment amplified by Coxon’s self-described “crying” guitar lick. More glass-half-full is the sanguine ‘Ong Ong’ , straying close to Gorillaz territory with its breezy la-la hook and mushy sing-a-long chorus.

Where 2003’s Think Tank grappled with and tried to make sense of a post 9/11 world amid a time where it genuinely felt like the end of days weren’t far off, The Magic Whip is still punctuated with the same existential anxieties albeit on a more socio-environmental level. Dave Rowntree’s marching band drums mingle with frantic strings to convey an air of panic on human overpopulation lament ‘There Are Too Many Of Us’ (“There are too many of us, that’s plain to see, we all believe in praying, for our immortality”), while the strange bleeps, vocal samples and drum beats in ‘Pyongyang’ transmit the mysticism of Albarn’s visit to North Korea in 2013. On dusky closer ‘Mirrorball’, drowsy, reverb drenched guitars and oriental strings knot around Albarn’s refrain of “hold close to me” as the track gradually fades into a blissed out denouement.

When hearing the news that Blur had returned to the studio to work on a new album, a vast percentage would have no doubt been satisfied if the end result was a solid set of no frills, Parklife-lite songs which delivered a jaunt through the festival circuit and another couple of dates at Hyde Park. Yet The Magic Whip has already offered that up plus more. Harnessed with a fully realised maturity and humbled by a self-awareness and understanding of the position they find themselves in, it shows that Blur can still capture their classic essence while exploring new directions and themes – the signifier of a reunion that can relive the old times yet not rest on its laurels. One of Think Tank’s saddest moments came when Albarn sang of how his world was spinning out of time. If The Magic Whip is anything to go by, he couldn’t have been more wrong.