James Blake: "On this album, I was so conscious of where I was recording, not just what I was recording"

Across six previous studio albums, James Blake has built a reputation as one of contemporary music’s most inventive artists. He memorably first broke out on the cusp of the 2010s with a series of EPs that married innovative, restless electronic beats with the rich, honeyed timbre of his voice.

They also folded in a distinctive, ever-changing blend of sounds – from R&B and soul to a glut of dance subgenres. His 2011 self-titled debut reached the UK top 10 and was nominated for the Mercury Prize; he went on to win the latter two years later for his second album, Overgrown.

Blake’s work as a versatile and highly collaborative songwriter and producer has been just as notable – working with some of the most successful contemporary artists including Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, SZA, Rosalía and Kendrick Lamar.

His new album Trying Times is an exquisite piece of work, immaculately produced, and has me wondering: how do you begin to make an LP like this?

“I don’t think I’m making one at the start,” James grins, “and then at some point, it turns into one, and I’m like, ‘Oh fuck, I have to do this again.’”

On the cover of Trying Times, Blake stands half in shadow, surrounded by china plates spinning atop tall, slender spindles. One hand reaches out to lightly steady a plate as it turns, while the other rises in the air, the gesture recalling a conductor poised to bring an orchestra into motion.

It’s the prefect summation of an artist whose work ethic is, frankly, rather ridiculous. Whilst making his own album, Blake is creating a record, and producing another (Dave’s The Boy Who Played The Harp), whilst also going independent and managing himself.

Oh, and chuck into that his work with Ludwig Göransson for Ryan Coogler’s Oscar-winning Sinners, relocating from LA to London, and getting involved in several (hopefully) music industry shaking projects. Regarding his relocation, I wonder does James have any truck with Debord and the Situationists’ psychogeography conceit, about your surroundings impacting emotions and behaviour.

“Absolutely,” he agrees. “I’ve never heard it called psychogeography, but I think there’s a spiritual resonance to the ground you’re on and the place you’re in, which affects the way you write, and I think the way you feel. There is that phrase – ‘Wherever you go. There you are’. There is some element of that, but I think that’s just one part of the equation.

“Lowry wouldn’t have been Lowry if he wasn’t where he was. I also think there’s a spiritual and social feeling of displacement when we move from place to place, which has to be felt to be understood, and I think that affects music too.”

In Derrida’s Spectres Of Marx, he posits his idea of Hauntology – suggesting that the past never fully disappears. Instead, it lingers like a ghost, shaping the present and haunting the future. Many cultural theorists have extended that conceit into other arenas, including the arts.

“Yes, not being able to think outside of a certain paradigm,” James attests. “That’s slightly a different application to something like, does it live in within the walls of a studio? But I think how it applies to the record, or really any creative process, is something that I became more and more aware of as I got older.

“I’ve been to a lot of studios where we’re spending so much money to be there, and I actually feel more closed off, and things aren’t working, nothing’s going right. Sometimes, I think people put that down to – there’s pressure because we’re spending money on the studio, but sometimes that can be potentially the resonance of the room, or even sometimes the orientation.

“I think writers are affected by some quite subtle things. On this album, I was so conscious of where I was recording, not just what I was recording.”

Much of the record was made at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios in Somerset, a rural setting that encouraged James to open the record up and let the light in, literally and metaphorically. Some recording was also done at his house in Los Angeles, where he felt things also flowed.

But let’s dig further into the album. Single ‘Death Of Love’ is a marvellous piece of work – part flamenco, Gnawa and alternative R&B, with a Leonard Cohen sample from ‘You Want It Darker’ sung by a Welsh choir.

In ‘You Want It Darker’ Cohen sings, “A million candles burning for the help that never came”. Here, James sings, “Don’t leave me behind over one bad hour, sometimes we come back empty-handed like bees from empty flowers.” I wonder is there an element of the complicated relationship between humanity and the divine pulsing through his song as well?

“That lyric to me,” James says, “is the feeling of somebody losing empathy for others or from others, and then feeling more and more isolated. To the point where you’re saying to them, ‘Don’t leave me behind over one bad hour’, because suicide is not always somebody feeling suicidal for a long time.

“Sometimes it’s just panic. Very often, it’s just one really bad hour that they just couldn’t handle, and if they just got through that hour, it could have been a whole different life. You won’t always get the connection you’re looking for, but if you try, if you have faith in humans, essentially, you will eventually find it.

UTTERLY SINGULAR

“There’s a mediator between people right now,” he continues, “which is obviously technology. There is something outside of us that is driving a wedge between us and it’s coming in the guise of something fun, something apparently connective, but actually it is that plastic flower.”

James’ debut eponymous album offered a strain of post-dubstep soul that was utterly singular. On ‘Days Go By’, off the current record, disassociated voices chime “I love you”, and chatter “I’ll be there for you” – bringing to mind the hardware samplers of yore. Which perhaps could now be viewed as benevolent robots,  through the prism of the ominous rise of AI.

“Actually, it’s funny you say that,” James laughs. “Because I feel like technology has always been part of my process, that it helps me connect. I find it’s able to embellish the way I connect with people. A good example being a disembodied voice, where it’s kind of pitched and warped, can help tell a story without actually being the main character.

“So almost like a narrator, or an outside voice, that can help the story along. In ‘Days Go By’, the generated voice of ‘I’ll be there for you’ is lined up with the Dizzy sample, ‘I love you’. That voice, in a way, is to AI music what the Doctor Who soundtrack is to the way I make electronic music. It’s such a rudimentary form of a robotic voice, it’s almost a cliche. But it had to be, because it’s the only way of actually putting that message across.”

James delivered a boss performance of ‘I Had A Dream She Took My Hand’ on Jimmy Fallon, a track that contains a rather brilliant sample from East LA outfit Thee Sinseers.

“They are a wonderful band”, James declares. “I love them and kindly they cleared the sample. When I first heard it, I didn’t know it was them, because Dom Maker (longtime Blake collaborator) did the sample and I just assumed it was a band from the 1950s. I didn’t find out until we had to clear it who the band was, but they’re incredible. I hope that people who listen to ‘I Had A Dream’ then go and listen to them.

“I had a similar experience on ‘Barefoot In The Park’ (featuring Rosalía, off Blake’s fourth record Assume Form),” James expands. “It was Valerie Armstrong, who’s an Irish singer. She had a song called ‘Fill Fill a Rún ó’, we sampled her, and again after DOM had sampled her.”

As if he hasn’t enough on his hands, James has recently been involved with two artist-controlled platforms – Vault and B-Side – both tied to his wider campaign to give musicians more direct control over how their work and shows reach fans. B-Side is a ticketing and fan-access platform James has used for his live shows.

Vault meanwhile is a direct-to-fan subscription platform that Blake helped launch in 2024. The idea is simple – artists can upload unreleased music, demos, or archive material and fans pay a monthly subscription to access it.

“With Vault,” James says, “it’s a revenue stream that hasn’t existed before. Because there’s loads of unreleased music that people are sitting on and if they put it on streamers, they’re not being really paid for it. We’re starting out. It’s going to be slow. Think about something like Substack. It started 12, 14 years ago. Vault started literally last year, as did B-side, so I’m taking a huge risk, because I’m trying to create a community from scratch and potentially fail.”

SUPPORT NETWORK

Indify is another strand of the new industry infrastructure James has been exploring. The platform operates as a marketplace connecting independent artists with industry partners – marketing teams, distributors, investors, sync agencies and release strategists – allowing musicians to assemble their own support network outside the traditional label system.

“Rather than going the label route,” James outlines, “you create something independent and self-contained, and so that was another huge risk. I now have this big mailing list, which I’ve been shouting from the rafters about, about how musicians should be controlling their own mailing list, going direct to people.”

James tells me that he sold out a run of shows through his mailing list, and that the tickets being sold possess a more intimate feeling.

“I know a lot of these people,” James relates. “I see them at the shows. I chat to them, it’s not like Instagram or TikTok, where you might not ever engage with that person again, and the interactions you’re having are much more surface level. Whereas here’s a place where we’re all on solid ground, we all know where we stand.”

•Trying Times is out now.