James Blake - Trying Times

English producer, songwriter, and musician James Blake returns with Trying Times, his seventh studio album and first fully independent release. Written between London and Los Angeles, the record confronts the turbulence of the past several years, global unrest, fractured discourse, and personal reckoning, while searching for empathy, connection, and love amid the chaos. It arrives after Blake exited his twelve-year deal with Polydor in 2024, choosing instead to release music through Good Boy Records and the artist-investor platform Indify.

That independence shows up directly in the credits. Trying Times is executive produced by Jameela Jamil, Blake's longtime partner, whose creative input he's said has shaped his music since 2016's The Colour in Anything, an album he's cited as a direct sonic touchstone for this one. Dave and Monica Martin both make appearances across the record's thirteen tracks, and Blake moves fluidly between his familiar hushed electronic soul and moments of genuine warmth throughout. The title track and "Didn't Come to Argue" stand out as some of his most direct, unguarded songwriting in years, trading abstraction for something closer to plain emotional statement.

Working outside a major label system for the first time in his career, Blake sounds unusually free here, less concerned with polish and more focused on connection, a fitting evolution for an artist who's spent over a decade defining a specific strain of intimate, bass-heavy electronic music.

This limited white lightning vinyl pressing spreads the album across two LPs in a gatefold jacket, giving the low end and Blake's signature negative space plenty of room to breathe.