Friends That Break Your Heart

“Friends That Break Your Heart” is Blake’s best and most refined album to date, one that finds him further down the several paths he’s somehow simultaneously following: more conventional and more disruptive, prettier and more disturbing, all at the same time.

His shifts in sound are as delicate as his music, continuing to showcase his ability to blur styles with unparalleled precision.

Many affecting tracks detail the sharknado of outrage and bewilderment in Blake’s trademark delicate soprano, offset occasionally by well-chosen collaborators (SZA, or rappers JID and SwaVay) or startlingly pitch-shifted vocals.

The LP’s home stretch is up there with Blake’s best, not just in the tense penultimate title track and wet-cheeked closer ‘If I’m Insecure’, but on the lead single. ‘Say What You Will’ shows off the magic trick Blake’s perfected by now. Vocally, he’s unsettlingly beautiful.

Few artists can make such heartbreak sound so pretty, while still reflecting on all its weirdness and complexity.

Friends That Break Your Heart is Blake at his most pared-back and unflinching lyrically and could also be considered his most accessible album yet. For some, this dismal balladry might feel a bit too far removed from the experimentally-textured electronics of his first two albums, yet Blake has found a brilliant way to still be unconventional and accessible at the same time.

Love is messy, and friendship can be even messier. With this album, James Blake succeeds in tapping into the ways that these emotions can be tangled together, for better or for worse.

In its best moments, all of which come, ironically enough, on the solo tracks of the record rather than the collaborations, this questioning and double guessing of himself really comes through.

Sounding like it was created from the other side of the crushing sadness that defined his earliest work, the album continues Blake's incremental shift to lighter material and songs that lean more into acceptance than torment.

Blake's fragmented post-dubstep has always had an air of bleak melancholy, but nothing he's done has been quite as self-consciously miserable as this. [Nov 2021, p.25]

It does occasionally err too heavily towards swaying ballad tropes, but importantly Blake never hides his feelings through allegory or metaphor, nor does he mangle his vocal delivery with electronic trickery.

Blake’s a master at making heartbreak sound beautiful. Now, on Friends That Break Your Heart, he makes it sound like something in service of the best version of yourself.

Throughout Friends That Break Your Heart, Blake is trying on different sounds, different styles, and producing some good music along the way, but he ends the record still unsure of where he should be.