Trying Times: James Blake at His Finest

For James Blake, grace alone matters. Especially when the zeitgeist resembles a diffuse buzz sabotaging our saturated lives and becoming the framework from which one must break free. Here, the contemporary vertigo of these trying times (“trying times” in the original) permeates the textures, stretches the sonic fabrics—largely recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios after two and a half years of reflection.

“Too many people crashing he sings in Obsession. But James Blake also recalls the refuge that love provides, and this in all its forms. A multiplicity of beating hearts for which he rediscovered the creative vitality of his third album, The Colour in Anything (2016): “As if I were paying homage to what I would have liked to do at the time,” he says.

Echoes of Leonard Cohen

From this inner movement unfolds a grand pop work paired with an emotional journey, opening with synthetic bursts and the manipulated vocal texture of Walk Out Music. It is followed by Death of Love, carried by a sample (the choir of a Montreal synagogue) from the sublime You Want It Darker released by Leonard Cohen shortly before he bowed out.

In the midst of digital and spiritual disembodiment, James Blake questions our connection to others. As for the title track, with a soul incarnated that might have pleased Sam Cooke, it opens the door to a more corporeal energy. Cultivating a trip-hop vein, Days Go By captivates with its ability to carve out the scars of funk and house, music as hedonistic as it is activist.

Carried by his impeccably slacker riffs, the laid-back yet meticulously calibrated power pop of Make Something Up proves both familiar and singular. A formula that could, in fact, summarize Trying Times. For proof, the hip-hop demonstration on Doesn’t Just Happen, shared with the British rapper Dave, whom James Blake had helped for the excellent The Boy Who Played the Harp, in 2025.

In the Swirls of an English Garage

There he condenses with mastery the southern cloud, East Coast rap in the Wu-Tang Clan vein and the Californian groove in just over three minutes. And then there is the R&B purity of Through the High Wire, the gospel declaration I Had a Dream She Took My Hand, the synthetic organ of Feel It Again, only accompanied by Blake’s voice, and the multiple variations of Didn’t Come to Argue with the Chicago-born singer Monica Martin, playful both in its storytelling and its form, not choosing between ethereal synthpop and dancing beats. It is, moreover, the dancefloor that calls to us on Rest of Your Life, conjuring fate within the swirls of an English garage.

“Just a little higher,” demands James Blake in a concluding prayer, where his piano is joined by strings whose crescendos rend the soul. Thirteen tracks to be placed among the year’s great successes, and we can finally escape our horizons that are too often narrowed—from every perspective—by our environments, urban and rural, and by an overload of information. In this era that is unsettled, afflicted, and absurd, ours, he offers the most vibrant of antidotes.

Trying Times (Good Boy Records/Virgin Records/Universal). Out on March 13.