Album Review: Trying Times by James Blake
Blake’s first independent album trades minimalist cool for raw admissions about love dying and wanting to live. It’s the most specific he’s ever been.
For the better part of fifteen years, the job was clear enough. Produce for Beyoncé, for Kendrick Lamar, for Travis Scott and ROSALÍA, and watch those records climb while your own got politely ignored. Win a Mercury Prize at twenty-four, spend a decade on Republic and Polydor, become the guy whose pitched-down vocals and piano chords other artists wanted on their biggest songs. Then talk openly about how none of it paid the way it should have, how streaming economics and label dysfunction had turned him into a utility player subsidizing someone else’s spotlight. James Blake made Playing Robots Into Heaven in 2023, a deliberate pivot toward club structures that split his audience. Trying Times, his seventh album and first independent release, has nothing in common with that record. It’s the work of someone who sat down alone and started writing about what was actually wrong.
Most of it is about love falling apart. “Death of Love” begins with “Hineni,” Hebrew for “here I am,” a biblical response to being called. Then it asks,
“Is there no good faith? Is our love misplaced?”
Blake gets more specific in the third pass. “Don’t leave me behind/Over one bad hour,” he sings, and then: “Sometimes we come back empty-handed/Like bees from plastic flowers.” That image sticks because it isn’t decorative. It says something about going through the motions of devotion and returning with nothing. The flower was fake, the effort was wasted, and you didn’t know until you’d already committed. “Didn’t Come to Argue” splits into two halves, and the first one finds Blake admitting, “I don’t have any friends/I don’t care where to head,” before describing himself stuck “in the middle of time/Like a butterfly behind glass/I flew, but that was in the park.” Monica Martin takes over the second half with a chorus that shrugs at heartbreak. “Oh, I think it’s overrated,” she sings, while Blake mutters underneath, “Can I take your hand with no plan to take your hand.” Two people in the same song, moving in opposite directions, neither one winning the argument they didn’t come to have.
“Make Something Up” is the hardest moment on Trying Times to sit with. The second half goes:
“And when I’m stood up on that bridge
And the voices compel me
Even though I don’t want to die
What’s the word for that?”
That question, “What’s the word for that?”, carries the whole cut. Blake has spoken publicly about depression and suicidal ideation for years. Here he describes a specific scenario, a specific location, a specific contradiction between the compulsion and the refusal, and then asks language itself to catch up. The chorus, “Why don’t we make something up?”, stops being whimsical once you hear what it’s responding to. Earlier in the song, he writes about a car becoming a hearse, about “the sick becomes the nurse,” each time adding, “We never rehearsed for that.” He’s cataloguing the moments life doesn’t prepare you for and landing on the one that scares him most. The fact that he leaves it as a question, with no resolution and no reassurance, is braver than almost anything else released this year.
Dave’s guest turn on “Doesn’t Just Happen” arrives with a weight the rest of the album can’t quite match. “If bein’ a good man was easy, I’d still be me, cah I do shit the hard way,” he begins, and from there the bars pile confession on top of confession without pausing to breathe. “My girlfriend hates me, deep down, maybe I do too.” “We used to jack niggas in the morning.” “Therapy couch like Tony Soprano.” He draws a line from street violence to dirty money to spiritual aspiration in a single run, landing on, “I got the country’s sins on finance, I know we all wanna make it to heaven, but it—doesn’t just happen.” The punchline borrows Blake’s chorus and twists it from a statement about romantic effort into something closer to damnation. Blake’s bridge afterward, “Maybe you stopped putting in time/Somewhere along the line,” quietly returns the piece to the relationship, but Dave’s contribution has already blown the walls out. It’s the most lyrically packed moment on a record that otherwise favors saying less.
Two songs look beyond the relationship. “Just a Little Higher” leads with, “Something’s wrong in the city I was born in/Something’s wrong in the countryside/Everyone’s getting different information/So how can we get on the same side?” It’s the most plainspoken Blake has ever been about anything outside his own head. The second verse digs at displacement and distrust, people hiding ties to where they grew up, leaving because “we set on fire,” before pulling back to, “Well, who am I to tell you what to believe in?/Just be sure only to believe your eyes.” “Through the High Wire” moves through similar ground from a different angle: “I know people love a story/And the whispers change/Change ‘til we all fall from glory.” Neither song pretends to offer a political argument. They’re noticing that the fractures Blake keeps describing between two people might have something to do with the fractures between everybody else.
A few songs here run thin. “Rest of Your Life” poses one beautiful question—“What are you doing the rest of your life?”—and then lets the phrase “of your life” fill the remainder, dozens and dozens of times, until the outro backs off with “No pressure/I’m breezy.” The sparseness works better on the title track, where “I’m breaking / I hide it well/‘Cause I can’t afford to replace the shell” packs a full admission into COUPLE LINES and stops. When he retreats to atmosphere and lets a single phrase do all the work, the music thins out, and what looked like restraint turns into an empty room. But the LP’s best moments don’t have that problem. “Make Something Up” puts words to something that needed them. Dave’s contribution to “Doesn’t Just Happen” crams five or six confessions into one breath and means all of them. The title track admits to falling apart and doesn’t dress it up, just those three lines about breaking and hiding it well and not being able to afford a new shell.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Trying Times,” “Make Something Up,” “Doesn’t Just Happen”