🎵 James Blake (James Blake)

That universe would come to expand, on 2013’s streamlined Overgrown and 2016’s depressive The Colour In Anything. On 2019’s Assume Form, he brought in the many friends and guest collaborators he’d worked with over the years, opening up his typically interior solo albums into more of a collective. But there’s still something about his self-titled debut that stands a little above the rest — it’s singular and haunting. It’s no wonder that Blake’s touch would become shorthand for a kind of digitized poignancy among the rappers and musicians he’d go on to work with. While he applied the lessons he learned as an up-and-coming dubstep producer to his music with others, the music he made under his own name feels personal and conflicted. James Blake is still startling in its intimacy and solitude. It ushered in a decade worth of triumphs for Blake, even if he wasn’t exactly what we expected.