This Is Your Family Now

James Blake’s self-titled debut dropped the week before Valentine’s Day 2011, and if the timing was a coincidence, it was a generous one. The album was skeletal, plaintive, beautiful in a way that left you feeling slightly exposed for liking it—piano and voice processed until they sounded like grief that had learned to harmonize with itself. "Limit to Your Love" was the song everyone pointed to, a Feist cover stripped down to something barely recognizable and somehow more devastating for it.

Bloc Party by then had already made the transition from the frantic post-punk sprint of Silent Alarm to something more atmospheric and interior. Hercules and Love Affair brought the disco-house undercurrent—Andy Butler’s project, with its combination of melancholy and physical energy, had been quietly excellent since the self-titled debut in 2008. Together the three of them proposed a specific Valentine’s Day mood: I want company, but I’m also aware that company is complicated.

A good mixtape isn’t a playlist. It’s a position. This one was February in a way that felt honest—not the greeting-card version of the holiday, and not the performative anti-romance version either. Just the real thing: warmth edged with something unresolved.