James Blake

James Blake (last name: Litherland) is a keyboard player and a singer-songwriter with sophisticated melodic lines, electronic production and lots of sad, brooding songs to spare. He is very much an R&B crooner who works in a synth and electronics driven presentation, writing ballads that exude a sense of heartbreak and existential weight. His songs tend to shift between dreamy and sleepy, with plenty of tenderness and angst packed in them. His arrangements have been exceedingly sparse most of his established career, with plenty of space between instruments. He has been using more vocal layers and moving his beats closer to the front in his recent work, not to mention his occasional use of trap beats Perhaps surprisingly, his origins are in club music with deep bass and heavy dub influences, which can be seen in the EPs he released before his self-titled first album in 2011.