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.
Where pop tends to spring from heartache or loss, Blake sings from a grief that has less to do with romantic devastation than the slow erosion of deep connection in a fast-moving world. “Death of Love” sets the stakes early: a juddering bassline pulls up his dubstep roots, a choral murmur circling beneath, as a sample of Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” arrives like a depth charge. In such vast music, his hurt has room to settle.
Pooling in those wide-open spaces are reserves of gospel and soul and the kind of vaporous, unclassifiable electronic drift that has always been his home turf, melodies collapsing and rebuilding themselves in his digital laboratory. “I Had a Dream She Took My Hand”, anchored to an interpolation from retro-soul act Thee Sinseers, finds him in full forlorn-balladeer mode, disorientated as if by a half-remembered feeling.
“Didn’t Come to Argue”, featuring singer-songwriter Monica Martin, begins in one place and ends somewhere else entirely – grand piano giving way to splintered vocals and a hushed house groove. “Doesn’t Just Happen”, on which rapper Dave appears, is the album’s centrepiece: shadowy strings coil and tighten as the two artists strike off each other like flint. “Days Go By” plunders Dizzee Rascal’s “I Luv U” and repurposes it into an irresistible romantic riff, though the song is really about inertia – the steady creep of time that amounts to nothing.
Trying Times falters slightly in its final third – “Obsession” registers more as a sketch than a song – but these are minor frictions in a record whose emotional logic is otherwise unerring. The argument is that love – stubborn, unglamorous, daily love – is the only adequate response to the noise. For all Blake’s inter-genre invention, it turns out to be an album less interested in rupture than in endurance – in small, persistent acts of remaining open. They all add up – and, like the rewards of this quietly arresting record, they turn out to be enough.
‘Trying Times’ is released by Good Boy Records
