By Genre: Avant-Pop
Favorite Tracks: “I Had A Dream She Took My Hand,” “Didn’t Come To Argue,” Days Go By”
There is something of the VH1 aughts morning countdown, the adult contemporary bops skittering in the background of CBS melodramas, in the low cool of James Blake’s music. Emerging in the calm of a post-iPhone, mid-Obama musical landscape—when millennials excited about the future shifted their musical tastes toward whimsy and mild electronica to show they may be blogging at Buzzfeed, but they could still disco—Blake was part of the one-two punch of chillwave cool, along with St. Lucia. Whether or not James Blake is good is a difficult question to answer, but he is important, as he helped the indie Coors Lite set feel sexy in a way otherwise reserved for MGMT, Passion Pit, and Twin Shadow, and gave them a majestic, tasteful, R&B-inflected vibe to soundtrack their optimism and light depression. Blake’s 2011 self-titled debut is cinematic and swooning in a way that balances out vaguely annoying loops and breakbeats with D’Angelo-level production, and a tendency to bump against “white guy feeling himself too much” with lyrical and vocal sincerity, reflecting a reverence for the music he’s cribbing from.
Around the pandemic, tired of making songs perfect for a scene in an Olivia Wilde film, Blake got weird. He makes an ambient record that is simultaneously engaging and soothing, and surprises the pop universe with an excellent album-length collaboration with Lil Yachty that is impossible to check the math on, since Yachty is the only brilliant artist apart from the criminally overlooked Monica Martin (see below) that elevates Blake above mumbly British sad soul boi songwriting, bringing out a weirdness and exacting sense of craft that elevates the work to a level where the production heightens and twists with the drama of the vocals that he formerly struggled with on his own. These, along with a handful of rap production gigs, improve him like the Bionic Woman, making him a fascinating, quirky musical cyborg that is stronger than 10 anemic choir boys, and faster than 13 formerly-vegan, chain-smoking, untattooed LA-based producers. In essence, Blake is reborn.
On TRYING TIMES, his seventh album, Blake is making the same type of album as his debut, but with all of his recent experience and the trends of 2026 pop production brought to it, which is to say brighter, roomier, something with a je ne sais Spotify and Apple Music about it. It is also his first as an independent artist, which means nothing in terms of the sound, but is a beautifully dumb PR talking point. Still, there is a newfound energy to the record, as if Blake found a quarter in his couch, got invited to one of Questlove’s famous boardgame nights, and discovered the WICKED Sprite flavors would be available everywhere in perpetuity on his way to the studio; things just kept getting better. We open with “Walk Out Music,” which has a skittering, crisp 808 beat, bends of electronic zither, and, possibly, a guitar that’s run through a chorus pedal, pitch-shifted up in post. The song is genuinely beautiful and triumphant, like the incredible, always unnecessary songs that open the second comedy special of your favorite funny YouTube-Netflix stand-up.
Over and over, Blake minimizes his shortcomings (lyrically, he’s still, you know, learning) by delivering beautifully crafted songs. On “Death of Love,” for example, he makes use of a vocoder voice effect with ample space in the mid and larger range, which creates a sense of romantic loss when paired with a minimized production that uses an echoed/doubled chorus for select phrases, sparse self-harmony, and a foreboding instrumental phrase that sounds like the“waugh” effect often employed in horror. This is paired with the lights-out, Capital-G great “I Had A Dream She Took My Hand,” which has a floating vocal that is restrained and soulful (sorry) due largely to a chorus of self-harmonies sewn together into a strange, stunning bellows effect. It’s a swerve Blake never would have tried before his time working with talented rappers who can conceptualize risky, brilliant concepts. Again, Blake has become more than a boring, yet quietly beautiful electronica artist since the pandemic, and is better for it.
This brings us to the best James Blake album track, period: “Didn’t Come to Argue.” The song could be called “My 2025 Tax Returns Jointly Filed With Jameela,” and it would still be transcendent because it is built around the iridescent Monica Martin; the best talent Blake has is that he fundamentally understands how to collaborate with her and step up in the process. If you’re unfamiliar, Monica Martin possesses the best voice in American music, from the days when she was the best thing about folk-pop outfit Phox, to her current work as a solo artist who will hopefully gift the world another full-length record soon. Along with a keen sense of how to write lyrics that are honest and mysterious, tortured and clever, Martin’s genius (that’s right, genius) is in her humanity, which couldn’t be hidden or faked even if Jack Harlow’s producer got ahold of a track. This duet with Blake conjures the idea of soaring birds that caught a current and are riding it toward sunset as strings swell, and Blake, astutely aware of Martin’s power, shades the track with some robotic nonsense in the vocal production, which makes it all the more impressive how surely her weary, yearning alto breaks out from the earth placed over it. Blake knew a song about abandoning love before it can fail would be dramatic, but smartly saw Martin would be able to bend it into something human and alive.
After this, the album features a fantastic spot from Dave on “Doesn’t Just Happen,” where, again, Blake builds the track around his collaborator. Beyond this, the two tracks of note are “Days Go By” and “Rest Of Your Life,” which sound like roaming, happy throwbacks to club tracks of that brilliant 92-06 era, “Days Go By” reminiscent of the loopy vibrance of the Chemical Brothers and the Pelican City Toonami musical cues that played before ads for Dragon Ball Z. “Rest Of Your Life” makes use of a clap-like programmed beat, like a karaoke track for “Pump Up the Jam” that ends with a warbly outro like a yowling washing machine for extra delightful grime.
Again, even with the few awful tracks, like the warbly, extra-cheesy “Make Something Up,” which sees Blake in danger of feeling himself too much, not unlike the singer of the Lumineers, who can’t help but bring the overall quality of the record down, Blake could always get Alt-J fans to shoulder-waggle at an outdoor set sponsored by, say, Mountain Dew; now he can get them to really feel along with him as he rocks a Dew stage. Blake said he wants to unite people, and what better way to do this than to release an optimistic wish exhaled with precision into the world?
Comments