The Space Between Two Voices

James Blake builds songs the way certain architects design rooms—by thinking hard about what to leave out. His second album Overgrown came out in 2013 with that same quality as the debut: enormous amounts of air, a falsetto that sounds like it’s being heard through a wall, bass frequencies that sit in your chest rather than your ears. It won the Mercury Prize that year and nobody was particularly surprised.

"Life Round Here," featuring Chance the Rapper, is the kind of collaboration that shouldn’t work and then completely does. Chance had just dropped Acid Rap a few months earlier, establishing himself as someone operating on a different frequency than most of his contemporaries—warmer, stranger, jazzier. Here he doesn’t try to match Blake’s restraint or break it. He just exists alongside it. The result is genuinely strange: intimate and vast at the same time, like a late-night conversation that’s also somehow a city at 3am. The video is black and white and unhurried and not trying to prove anything.

There aren’t many songs from that year I still think about unprompted. This is one of them.