James Blake – Trying Times: Album Review

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James Blake’s new album maps the emotional wreckage of losing love with such specificity and such honesty that it raises a genuine question: was this ever meant for us at all?

There’s a moment midway through Trying Times where you catch yourself leaning in, then immediately feeling like you shouldn’t be.

Like you’ve walked into a room where someone is having the worst conversation of their life and the door has shut behind you.

That discomfort is entirely the point.

This might be James Blake’s most singular record, almost a concept album, though he’d probably resist the label.

And its focus is unflinching. It maps the emotional wreckage of losing love with such specificity and such honesty that it raises a genuine question: was this ever meant for us at all?

It doesn’t move in a straight line, because grief never does. Death Of Love announces the territory early, menacing and haunting, backed by an almost Gregorian choir that makes it somehow worse.

But Trying Times’ masterstroke is how it keeps wrong-footing you. I Had A Dream She Took My Hand arrives borderline jaunty, like an old-fashioned waltz, before revealing itself as the kind of scary wobbly music they play in haunted house movies.

It gets big, emotional and beautiful at the end, and that beauty makes it more unsettling, not less.

The title-track seems like the only respite from the melancholy and regret. Built around a lost Al Green warmth, think soft guitars and lilting groove.

James Blake’s voice moves between upper-register delicacy and soulful bass, like a solo instrument finding its range. It’s the album’s most straightforwardly gorgeous moment. Hold onto it. It doesn’t last.

Make Something Up initially feels like a shaft of light, almost upbeat, a couple trying to find something worth salvaging.

Then the lyrics land and the rug goes with them. It’s a eulogy for a relationship, loss rendered as something indistinguishable from grief.

And the track that follows, Didn’t Come To Argue, is a strange, sumptuous, almost Christine And The Queens-adjacent duet where the two voices never quite speak to each other.

One regretful, one defiant, neither really listening. You feel like you’re eavesdropping on something you have no business hearing.

Days Go By is the ignored-calls montage in a movie, with the protagonist stuck in limbo, blaming everyone and everything but himself while hovering on the edge of realisation.

Its light drum and bass/UK Garage shimmer land somewhere between Layo & Bushwacka and Artful Dodger, sounds nothing like how it feels, which is exactly right.

Then Dave makes an impactful appearance on Doesn’t Just Happen, with Blake, almost ghostly in the background, while something angrier and more bitter spills out.

These feel like the things you’d only say to yourself, and probably only half mean.

Obsession is Trying Times’ darkest point. Short, sparse, irrational. James Blake lost inside the memory. If this were a text message rather than a song, someone would stage an intervention.

Rest Of Your Life offers what sounds like a sunrise (proto-club beats, something almost hopeful) before you notice the beats are slightly wrong, the music tilted and off-kilter. It’s not a dawn. It’s a sunset dressed up as one.

Just A Little Higher closes it out with orchestral flourishes and vocals that will stay with you longer than you’d like. There’s no redemption, no rekindling.

Just someone who no longer recognises the world they’ve made for themselves, and a final, broader suggestion (”adjust your sights, they’re playing us”), that the pain might be pointing at something bigger than one relationship.

Whether the grief here is real or imagined barely matters. It’s honest, raw, and deeply, uncomfortably relatable.

A stunning record that James Blake has somehow both made entirely for himself and, in sharing it, turned into a gift.

Just not a comfortable one.

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