Eighteen tracks from a British producer who started in dubstep, became a singer-songwriter, and ended up as the most in-demand collaborator in American rap. James Blake James Blake emerged from the London post-dubstep scene around 2009 making instrumental tracks defined by enormous sub-bass and long silences. Then he started singing, and his self-titled 2011 album turned out to be something else entirely: a piano-and-voice record with electronic architecture, and one of the most influential British albums of its decade. His 2013 album Overgrown won the Mercury Prize. Since then he has become an unlikely fixture in American hip-hop — working with Kendrick Lamar , Beyoncé , Jay-Z , Frank Ocean , Travis Scott and André 3000 — largely because his sense of space is unlike anyone else's. He has also spoken publicly and usefully about depression and about the "sad boy" framing applied to men who write about emotion. What to listen for ...