James Blake’s earliest records synthesised the urgent and the languid, the private and the profound. His was an unlikely alchemy: dubstep’s sub-bass parcelled up with gospel-leaning vocals that cracked and soared; twitchy, pitch-shifted R&B samples knocked against stately piano chords; the paranoia of a hostile dancefloor rendered in hymns of alienation. The world would come to him – Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, a Mercury Prize in 2013 – but the music never quite lost its solitary, confessional quality. When Blake first moped into the spotlight in 2009, he helped usher in an era of popular music willing to sit with sadness rather than resolve it, to let it bleed. Trying Times, arriving three years after the electronic reset of Playing Robots Into Heaven, is his seventh album – and arguably his most searching.
It is also his first as an independent artist – after he left Republic Records in 2024 – and the liberation is audible. Having grown weary of his industry, the 37-year-old has spent recent months taking aim at TikTok, Live Nation and Spotify with a directness that belies his reticent music. That tension runs through Trying Times like a fault line. “Walk Out Music” opens the album fists raised, with a pugnacious swagger that soon dissolves into something more spectral: synthesisers that pulse and hover like a Twin Peaks dream sequence, Blake’s tremulous falsetto shadowed by a digitally altered echo. “You’re no good to anyone, dead,” he sings.
