James Blake has always sounded like he’s singing from the eye of a storm—half serene, half shredded. With Friends That Break Your Heart, he doubled down on that push-and-pull, an album born partly out of pandemic isolation and partly out of the simple fact that friendships can cut deeper than romances. “When I looked back at all the songs I’d written, I’d dwelled more on difficult friendship situations than I had on love,” he said. “It felt very relevant to the current state of the world. Friendships really took a beating.”
The songs weren’t all quarantine babies. Some had been around for years, like “Say What You Will,” which became the lead single, complete with a video co-starring Finneas and Blake’s nod to Teddy Roosevelt’s “comparison is the thief of joy.” “The point I was trying to make is that it doesn’t matter how successful you are,” Blake said. “There’s always going to be someone who presses your buttons, who seems to get everything right while you get everything wrong. That person doesn’t even know you’re competing with them.” He laughed. “They’re probably more successful because they don’t care.”
He knows how ridiculous the comparison game gets—especially on Instagram, where even strangers’ vacations can feel like daggers. On his own feed he posted the mantra: Being okay with where you’re at and fuck ’em all. It’s a philosophy that fits the record’s messy ache.
The irony is that Blake has always been hard to pin down in the first place. His songs bend when others would straighten, doubling back instead of resolving cleanly. It’s part of what makes him singular—and, by his own admission, insecure. “It’s probably one of the things I’ve been most insecure about,” he said. “Sometimes I worry those twists make my music less accessible. It might be the thing that keeps me from being accepted in one group but gives me complete acceptance with others. It divides people. But you can’t walk around thinking that—you’ve got to be yourself.” Rick Rubin once told him his greatest skill was “collage.” Blake took that as gospel: “I love it when somebody says the thing you thought was embarrassing is actually the best part.”
That willingness to leave the seams showing is why his cover of Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” worked at all. “I was really afraid of it,” he admitted. “Joy Division fans are precious about those songs. But I just tried to respect it, not do anything too drastic, keep the spirit of it.” He even translated the track’s iconic bell-tree shimmer into a piano swoop. “As long as you respect the song, that’s all you can do.”
Respect is a through-line across the record’s collaborations, too. SZA, Monica Martin, JID, and SwaVay all slot into Blake’s world without breaking it. One verse came back in 30 minutes. “He just turned it around and it was exactly the take that’s on there now,” Blake said, still impressed. “It was masterful. It sounded like early Eminem—playful, visual, surprising. You don’t expect to hear that on one of my albums. Perfect.”
Even his vocals feel wider this time—lower, richer, sometimes climbing into ranges he once reserved for falsetto. “I didn’t really start singing in my lower register until recently,” he said. “I was always in falsetto, imitating the singers I loved—Prince, D’Angelo, Joni Mitchell, the Bee Gees. But falsetto doesn’t always convey what I want. It can feel disembodied. I don’t speak like that.”
On “Funeral,” he pushes into soprano territory, catching listeners off guard. “It’s kind of like Adele’s trick—low verse, high chorus—but my little version of it,” he said. “I just wanted to explore more of my actual voice, the natural side.”
The album’s title says it all. Friendships fracture, families splinter, sometimes over politics, sometimes over vaccines. Blake put it plainly: “There were people who just didn’t make it into the new reality of our lives. And sometimes you saw things in people you didn’t know were there.”
Still, Friends That Break Your Heart isn’t despair—it’s daring. The kind of record that isn’t afraid to stay weird, to leave the crooked edges unsanded. “I enjoy daring music,” Blake said. “Otherwise you’re just… I don’t know.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
