James Blake - Trying Times

There’s a lot to be said about consistency. From the release of his self-titled 2011 debut on, James Blake has maintained a spot at the top level of electronic music, entirely undeterred by ebbs and flows in the genre’s wider popularity. He’s cemented himself as a soulful pioneer in the space, deliberately straddling his singer-songwriter alter ego both on record and at live shows. Even at his extremes - take 2023’s heavily dancefloor ready ‘Playing Robots Into Heaven’ or the comparable minimalist EDM of his debut - he has embodied something far removed from the genre that first birthed him, yet that effortlessly places him right at its centre.

Now, for ‘Trying Times’, his first solo record in three years, James goes it alone. Self-released through his own Good Boy imprint, it foregoes much of his previous record’s density for a curated cherry pick of the individual elements that have driven his career. There’s the rhythmic simplicity of ‘Walk Out Music’, his trademark genre-hopping on the Dave-featuring ‘Doesn’t Just Happen’, and the largely lyricless underground fever dream of ‘Rest of Your Life’. Elsewhere, there’s innovation on the soul led ‘Didn’t Come To Argue’, again featuring regular collaborator Monica Martin, the falsetto beaty of ‘Through The High Wire’, and an unexpectedly welcome orchestral flourish on cathartic closer ‘Just a Little Higher’. “Something’s wrong in the city I was born in,” James croons in its opening moments.

“I’m breaking, I hide it well,” he reveals on the title track, with it finding himself again in an exploration of the multiple components that build his sound. It seems that adversity has taken him back in and out of the clubs, between sombre reflections and ethereal hope, and ultimately to a record that couldn’t be more consistently him. It paints this, his seventh studio album, as a compendium of his best parts, and perhaps his first to truly do so.