James Blake

James Blake makes the kind of music that sounds like it's happening in the room next door: a soulful, fragile falsetto floating over piano chords, then swallowed by sub-bass and silence. The kid from Enfield, born in 1988, first turned heads in 2010 with a run of 3 EPs, The Bells Sketch, CMYK and Klavierwerke, that bent post-dubstep's skittering electronics into something slow, strange and tender.

A&M signed him for the self-titled debut in 2011, a record critics fell hard for, and it made the UK top ten. It's where "Limit To Your Love" and "The Wilhelm Scream" live, songs that treat empty space as an instrument, with his voice looped and stacked until it becomes a choir of one.

Overgrown followed in 2013 on Republic and went further, warmer and more confident, with "Retrograde" as its centerpiece: a hummed hook, a buzzing synth rising like a siren, and Blake singing as if he's trying to talk someone off a ledge. A Grammy nomination for Best New Artist came his way too. Since then he's won a Mercury Prize and become an in-demand collaborator, writing and producing for Jay-Z, Kanye West, Beyonce, Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.