James Blake released a surprise album entitled ‘The Colour in Anything’ on Thursday night (05.06.16).
The 27-year-old singer – who recently lent his vocals to the tracks ‘Forward’ and ‘Pray You Catch Me’ on Beyoncé’s visual album ‘Lemonade’ – introduced his third studio record on Annie Mac’s Radio One show yesterday and shared two new tracks ‘I Need A Forest Fire’, featuring Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and ‘Radio Silence’.
Speaking on the show, the singer/songwriter – who hasn’t released new music in three years – said he was feeling "nervous" and added: "It’s been a long time. The first song I’m going to play, I guess, is the first song that was written [for this album] so I’ve been sitting on it for the longest. It was going to be the title track because there was almost a running joke that there’d been so much radio silence from me in my absence."
Despite taking a while to bring out new material, James – who Kanye West named as his favourite artist in 2012 – was a surprise contributor to Beyoncé’s latest visual album, ‘Lemonade’.
Speaking of working with the 34-year-old superstar, he said: "She’s wonderful. As wonderful in person as I hoped that she’d be. I just sang the right thing, I don’t know. I didn’t know what was going to happen with it. It could have ended up falling into the ether, but somehow it didn’t."
The ‘Retrograde’ hitmaker also revealed he drafted in famed record producer Rick Rubin – who has worked with Jay Z, Adele and Johnny Cash in the past – on some of the sessions for the record, and said it was great to "get a feel for what it would be like to have someone else man the controls."
James Blake drops surprise album The Colour in Anything
