At the heart of many James Blake songs lies an icy void, refracted through resonant frequencies and minor chord progressions that never seem to fully thaw out. It’s a loneliness that’s given auditory form through Blake’s cavernous music: close your eyes and imagine a vast expanse of empty tundra, or an endless chasm under the earth.
On “Death of Love,” the first offering from his upcoming album Trying Times, out March 13, Blake’s compositional chops shine. His tentative falsetto flickers and ripples over a smear of bass and smudged synthpads; when the production gently mutates at the second verse, becoming brawnier and more insistent, you can feel his paranoia weighing on your ears. Ditching the clubby motifs of his previous solo full-length Playing Robots Into Heaven, the frigid sonic palette on “Death” harkens back to his early 2010s albums James Blake and Overgrown.
It’s a shame, then, that Blake’s lyrics on “Death of Love” feel anemic in comparison.
On early tracks like “Voyeur” and “I Never Learnt To Share,” there was a sly, oblique quality to Blake’s songwriting. Lyrics like, “I should do whatever will make you / feel secure,” felt compelling because of how starkly they stood out amidst a thicket of sonic haze and impressionistic metaphors. But roughly 10 years ago, Blake’s confessionalism tilted towards frankness, aligning with the pop music of Taylor Swift and Drake, and ditching coy subtleties for full-throated declarations. Sometimes that worked (like on “Love Me In Whatever Way” or “Mulholland”), but now, Blake can come across a little like Rupi Kaur, demanding listeners to imbue his writing with more emotional depth than it truly possesses.
“I think we might be walking / to the death of love,” the titular refrain from “Death of Love,” could land for those in the middle of a protracted breakup, but it’s unappealingly blunt from an artist capable of cutting us with the truth. Rhetorical queries (“Is there no good faith?”) fail to coalesce into substantive emotion, leaving the heavy lifting to the instrumental instead. Still, there are glimmers of Blake’s better poetic impulses. Near the song’s end, he sings, “Sometimes we come back empty handed / Like bees from plastic flowers,” rendering an image that is crisp, distinct, and evocative. For a second, “Death of Love” feels like it’s showing rather than telling.
