It feels strange now to recall a time when James Blake’s elevation from underground post-dubstep auteur to hotly-tipped mainstream artist seemed like the result of a clerical error. It was hard not to be impressed by his eponymous 2011 debut album, but it was equally hard not to wonder whether this really was the stuff of which silver medals in the BBC Sound of … poll and spots on the Radio 1 A-list were made. If you listened to its sparse, abstract, deeply uncommercial assemblages of treated vocals, electronics and piano, there was something very odd indeed about his name being mentioned in the same breath as Jessie J.

The album cover for Assume Form

But look at him now: ensconced in sunny LA with a celebrity girlfriend, the actor Jameela Jamil, his mobile number apparently in every major rapper’s phone, so he’s can be reached on speed dial whenever a melancholy voice is required. His solo albums have sold solidly, not spectacularly, but a list of prior collaborators – Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, Kanye West, Beyoncé, Chance the Rapper, Future, Jay-Z, Vince Staples – offers evidence of a man embedded at the centre of pop culture.

He has good reason to feel pleased, which explains Assume Form. His last album, the utterly downcast The Colour in Anything, so amplified the frail, introverted, careworn aspects of his sound that it started to feel rather too whiny and self-pitying for its own good. By contrast, its follow-up arrives bearing songs called things like Mile High, Barefoot in the Park and Can’t Believe the Way We Flow.

The guest list reveals Blake’s well-connected status: Travis Scott, chart-topping trap producer Metro Boomin and Outkast’s André 3000. The latter’s verse, over scrabbling electric guitar and a gently chugging house beat on Where’s the Catch is, mercifully, a more palatable representation of their musical kinship than the 17-minute instrumental improvisation on piano and bass clarinet the pair released on SoundCloud last year. The music, meanwhile, is noticeably more pop-facing than its predecessors. Such things are obviously relative – Blake’s songs are frequently still winding and episodic and flecked with lapses into silence: on the title track, scattered electronic blips crash out of time against a fluttering piano line and sped-up female voices.

But some of its pleasures are remarkably straightforward. I’ll Come Too sounds appealingly like the kind of songs Harry Nilsson used to write when feeling inspired by pop from the pre-rock’n’roll era. Based around an iridescent sample from the Manhattans’ 1977 single It Feels So Good to Be Loved So Bad, Blake’s Can’t Believe the Way We Flow is a blissful, lovely update of the sound that emerged when practitioners of soft 70s soul keyed into the sleepy, small-hours feel of doo-wop ballads. The mood of budding romance is kept from feeling sickly by the darkness lurking at its edges. Barefoot in the Park, which features a star turn by Spanish singer Rosalía, doesn’t just share its title with the Neil Simon play, but its theme: its protagonist is fragile and shut in, there’s a faint sense of distrust about their embrace of happiness.

Without wishing to rain on Blake’s new-found romantic contentment, there are drawbacks. His voice is naturally lugubrious: perfect for expressing racked sorrow, useful for adding the slightly uncertain edge to Barefoot in the Park, but not really the ideal vehicle for conveying unbridled lust. There’s something jarring about hearing Blake lowing mournfully away in the background while Travis Scott hymns the pleasures of having it off on a plane on Mile High – a bit like the high-altitude bunk-up is being hampered by another passenger knocking on the toilet door and asking how much longer you’re going to be in there. You suspect there’s supposed to be a lubricious charge behind Tell Them, with its talk of getting what you came for in the dead of night, but when Blake takes over lead vocals from guest Moses Sumney, it just sounds odd and wheedling. “Tell them what you’ve been there dreaming about,” he quavers, as if threatening to burst into tears if she doesn’t, a passion-killer if ever there was one.

He’s no great shakes as a kind of Barry White for Burial fans, but that’s Assume Form’s only real flaw. The Colour in Anything sounded like a blind alley, so lost in its own personal misery that it had no interest in really connecting with anyone else. Assume Form feels like Blake opening out, adding fresh, noticeably brighter colours to his palette. Whether or not a smidge more commerciality turns this album into the kind of hit he was predicted to have at the start of the decade, it is immensely pleasing to witness an artist who seemed to be at a dead end now moving forward.

This week Alexis listened to

BbyMutha: Sleeping With the Enemy

The torrential 2018 output of the self-styled “black Marge Simpson” involved rapping over everything from Grimes tracks to disquieting electronic noise. This is pure pop by comparison: guest vocal from “rogue R&B” singer Kindora; indelible, joyous guitar sample, a delight from start to finish.