Like many British kids—particularly those who loved to disappear into books—I have a deeply harbored attachment to the work of writer Roald Dahl and illustrator Quentin Blake. So much so that the dark-humored children’s author (and sometime eroticist) and the scrappy artist are inseparable in my mind. In the Blake-illustrated editions of Dahl’s books that I pored over as a child, his scrawls often worked as punchlines in the narrative rather than simple decoration. Sometimes they were terrifying, often they were crude and funny.

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James Blake was also a British kid, and I suspect one who also liked to disappear into books. For him to choose the now 83-year-old Quentin Blake to illustrate his surprise-released album, The Colour In Anything, is a peculiarly intimate choice; and, frankly, a not especially cool one. It’s not the done thing for boundary-pushing electronic musicians to choose to have their work illustrated by octogenarian national treasures. The cover’s connection to children’s fiction is disarming—and the cover itself retains a Dahl-ish humor, with its naked woman hiding in the branches of the tree, the smirk on Blake’s face, and its notably muted colors despite the album’s name. Its unapologetically off-trend style might make some balk, but it cements the album, from the first glance, as what it is: an unabashedly sincere piece of work.

Some lines from James Blake profiles published overnight sound themselves like Roald Dahl outtakes with their surreal, barbed humor. Devon Maloney, for Pitchfork, notes with tongue in cheek that Blake “looks like a man who is perfectly comfortable out in the open, among humans.” Dorian Lynskey for The Guardian observes, “he is no longer lonely, no longer defensive, no longer a little bit of a prick.” What’s interesting about both of these descriptions is that they seem to suggest Blake was once a two-dimensional storybook villain, now grown into a fully fledged human being. Perhaps it would be truer to note that his artistic scope has outgrown the two-dimensional media narrative that existed of his character (that is: the perpetually moody sad boy).