Around the summer of 2016, shortly after his second album, “Love & Hate,” was released, Michael Kiwanuka started getting texts from Russell Crowe. The texts were friendly — compliments about his music, invitations to get a beer, enthusiastic updates about works in progress — but felt strangely portentous, like being invited behind a velvet rope. After all, Crowe, the Academy Award-winning star of “Gladiator,” was seeking out and befriending Kiwanuka, an acclaimed but relatively obscure singer-songwriter who still felt grateful for more than a few hundred likes on Instagram.

Kiwanuka felt the strangeness most intensely when he went to one of Crowe’s dinner parties. He hadn’t known it was a dinner party. He just thought Crowe was inviting him to hang out. But there he was, at a dining table in Crowe’s expensive London hotel suite, as a parade of Britain’s tabloid elite walked in and sat next to him: David Beckham, Tom Jones, Ed Sheeran. He could feel the eyes in the room bearing down on him, all of which seemed to be asking the same question: Who in the hell is that?

Kiwanuka’s third album, called “Kiwanuka” and out Friday, is a hard-won answer to that question. It’s a muscular, multilayered declaration of self-worth and reliance from an artist who has been open about his insecurities, both as a “Black Man in a White World,” as he put it in a trenchant 2016 song, and as a rock and soul singer who was born into the wrong decade.