JAMES BLAKE - Trying Times

I’m breaking

I hide it well

‘Cause I can’t afford to replace the shell

And the anxious end up alone

‘Cause there are far too many things we can’t control

That James Blake is a restless soul, on a collision course with modern times and in particular with the dynamics of the contemporary music industry, is old news by now. The English musician has voiced his more or less all-encompassing disdain time and again on social media, in interviews, at concerts. In short, Blake has for a while now embodied the heartbroken producer, depressed about everything and everyone.

"Trying Times" could therefore only condense the moods recently scattered by one of the alchemists of that strange thing called soul-step. Blake's seventh album is also the first to come out on an independent label, Good Boy, granted that this definition still carries any real weight in 2026, given that the LP is, in any case, distributed by a major.

"It's my favourite album ever. I know every artist says that, but I believe this is the best work I could possibly make. It's what gets me out of bed in the morning. And I can say that with confidence because I've dedicated twenty-five years to it," says the singer-songwriter, presenting thirteen songs that melodically (and thematically) express a sprawling unease, one that spans some of the most disparate corners of Blake's everyday life with a grief that is at times choral, at times intimate. Starting with the opening "Walk Out Music," which essentially picks up the rhythmic jolts of "Unluck" and pushes them even higher through an epic keyboard and lyrics of resignation.

You’re no good to anyone

Anyone

To anyone, anyone

Dead, dead, dead, dead

Dead

The following track, “Death Of Love”, a duet with Jameela Jamil, expands on Blake's blind, shadowy drifting through a mournful symphony driven by a funereal gospel choir floating in the background. Meanwhile “I Had A Dream She Took My Hand” opens the door to a sudden light that tiptoes into the recording studio, as Blake sings of an unwitting love, one to be honoured like the band on the Titanic just before the abyss. All delivered with the same lean, meditative touch.

Blake sings, in fact, like a wounded nightingale, or rather like an old-school soul preacher who has lost hope and no longer knows what to do. And in this slow descent to the bottom of the ravine, the title track emerges in all its brilliance. It's a ballad as essential as it is sublime, among the finest James Blake has ever written in his career. The same goes for the other little gem of the batch, “Make Something Up”, which once again evokes the best of Bill Withers, with a bewitching crescendo in its closing moments.

Soul scraps also crop up in “Didn’t Come To Argue”, a counterpoint to the breezy electronics of “Days Go By”, which brings Blake back to the present in a kind of hyper-ballad that paves the way for the electro-urban moves of the following “Doesn’t Just Happen”, complete with rap interludes and the inevitable androgynous vocals à la Burial.

Therapy couch like Tony Soprano, black Viano

Hit an artery, stabbed in a major

That’s staccato, cash or card though?

I got the country’s sins on finance

I know we all wanna make it to Heaven, but it (It doesn’t just happen)

James Blake tends to strip things down in the darkest moments (“Obsession”) and, conversely, electrifies everything around him when it's time to “have fun” and run wild like an A.G. Cook gripped by yet another quantum-pop delirium (“Rest Your Life”). These are moments of pure decompression, needed to catch a breath before a new fading lament reappears through the front door to tell us just how much Blake is struggling among the people of this era and this world (“Through The High Wire”).

It's an up-and-down of interrupted feelings and social disillusionment, one that couldn't do without a song like “Just A Little Higher”, yet another ballad epic enough to let us glimpse a new possible horizon from afar, while everyone flees, cities become unrecognisable, and the boy from Via Gluck contemplates the world between a weeping piano and a barely-touched violin.

With “Trying Times” Blake finds his way back onto the right path, one lost in patches over the last ten years amid unfocused releases and turning points that were anything but exciting. After his first three wonderful records, the London musician thus puts the room back in order and delivers an album that certainly isn't meant to be devoured in one sitting, but which, taken in the right doses, can offer genuinely intense and, for the most part, moving moments.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

21/03/2026