There’s a point early on Trying Times where James Blake sings, almost offhandedly, “You’re no good to anyone dead”, and it lands less like a lyric than a warning to himself. That line sits inside “Walk Out Music”, an opening that feels oddly confrontational for someone whose music has always preferred to retreat inward. There’s a tension in it, like he’s forcing himself to stay present.
This is Blake’s first fully independent record after stepping away from a major label, and you can hear that shift immediately. The songs feel less engineered toward clarity. They move in uneven shapes, sometimes resolving beautifully, sometimes just stopping where they are.
“Death of Love” follows the opener with something heavier, almost theatrical. The London Welsh Male Voice Choir drifts underneath Blake’s voice like a shadow, while a Leonard Cohen sample cuts through the track with a kind of fatalism. It’s one of the album’s most fully-formed ideas, a song about relationships slowly eroding, which is somehow worse.
“I Had a Dream She Took My Hand” softens things slightly, leaning into retro soul textures, doo-wop harmonies, warmer chords, but even here, nothing feels fully settled. It’s like Blake is borrowing the language of classic love songs without fully believing in it.
The title track, “Trying Times”, sits right at the centre of the record, and it feels like the axis everything turns around. It’s one of his most direct songs in years, simple phrasing, minimal arrangement, but there’s something strained in the delivery, like he’s trying to convince himself of the sentiment as much as the listener.
Then “Make Something Up” arrives, and it’s easily one of the most revealing moments here. The song circles around the inability to articulate feeling in a very real, frustrating sense. Lines drift, restart, contradict themselves. It sounds like a conversation where neither person quite knows what they mean, but both keep talking anyway. That kind of awkward honesty runs through most of the album.
“Didn’t Come to Argue”, with Monica Martin, feels deceptively calm. The arrangement is soft, almost comforting, but there’s distance in it, two voices sitting near each other but not quite connecting. It’s followed by “Days Go By”, which pulls subtly from grime and UK rhythmic structures, a reminder that Blake’s production instincts haven’t disappeared, they’ve just been folded into something less immediate.
“Doesn’t Just Happen”, featuring Dave, shifts the tone again. It’s more grounded, more external. Dave’s presence introduces a sharper perspective, observational, and suddenly the album opens outward, even if only briefly. It’s one of the few moments where Blake steps back and lets someone else define the emotional weight.
“Obsession” is barely a song in the traditional sense, more like an interlude, or a fragment that didn’t quite need expanding. Then “Rest of Your Life” arrives and re-centres everything. It’s one of the album’s most affecting tracks, taking a straightforward idea, staying with someone, and stretching it into something disorienting. The production builds, then slips, then rebuilds again, like the feeling itself is unstable.
“Through the High Wire” leans upward, almost hopeful, though even that hope feels conditional. The vocal processing glitches at moments, briefly distorting Blake’s voice, as if the song can’t fully hold itself together.
By the time you reach “Feel It Again” and “Just a Little Higher,” the album has thinned out emotionally, in a way that feels worn down. These closing tracks don’t offer resolution, they just ease the pressure slightly, letting things settle without answering anything.
What runs through Trying Times is a kind of quiet resistance — against expectation. Blake has always balanced electronic experimentation with fragile songwriting, but here he pulls those elements apart instead of blending them cleanly. Some tracks feel almost traditional in structure; others dissolve into fragments. That inconsistency is part of the point.
There’s also a noticeable shift in instrumentation. While earlier work leaned heavily on manipulated vocals and digital textures, parts of this album move toward more organic sounds — piano, guitar, unprocessed space — though never completely abandoning his electronic instincts.
Lyrically, the album stays locked on love, but not in the usual sense. These aren’t songs about heartbreak or romance in isolation. They’re about the effort of staying, the tension between connection and detachment, between wanting something to work and recognising when it might not. Across the record, that tension never resolves. It just changes shape.
That’s what makes Trying Times difficult at points, and also what makes it stick. Some songs feel underwritten, others overextended. But when it lands — “Death of Love,” “Make Something Up,” “Rest of Your Life” — it lands in a way that feels unforced and slightly accidental.
It’s not Blake’s most immediate album, and probably not his most consistent. But it might be one of his most honest, not because it says more, but because it leaves more unsaid.
