Suddenly I’m Hit

Retrograde opens like a held breath—sparse piano, that bass dropping in like something inevitable you’d already been warned about. James Blake’s falsetto floats up there where it has no business being this controlled, and then you stop questioning it entirely and just let it work. The song arrived ahead of Overgrown, still months away, and it announced something: he wasn’t a post-dubstep curiosity anymore, wasn’t some interesting formal experiment. He was doing something stranger and more patient, closer to actual soul music than any of the categorizations stuck to him had suggested. Suddenly I’m hit—just those three words, the way they fall out of the arrangement—and you’re done.