For an artist whose sound is steeped in isolation, cutting a forlorn figure on icy electronic laments that shiver with loneliness, James Blake arrives at his latest album Assume Form as one of the best connected people in popular music.

At some point over the last decade, while journeying from the fringes of London’s dubstep scene to the epicentre of American rap and pop, it became easier to list superstars the acclaimed producer-songwriter hasn’t worked with. Beyoncé recruited him for Lemonade. Frank Ocean called on him for Blonde. Drake has sampled him and Kanye West declared him “Kanye’s favourite artist” before a few ultimately ill-fated 2014 writing sessions together. Bon Iver, Chance the Rapper and Jay-Z are other studio sparring partners. Blake is up for two Grammy awards in rap categories this year, alongside rappers Kendrick Lamar, Jay Rock and Future for their track King’s Dead, taken from the Black Panther soundtrack.

Flamenco innovator Rosalía and neo-soul prodigy Moses Sumney guest on Assume Form, as does André 3000, the OutKast alumnus who doesn’t seem to step into a recording booth nowadays without Blake nearby (their collaboration on Assume Form is their fourth in as many years). Rapper Travis Scott also appears, returning the favour after Blake appeared on his album Astroworld.

“My brother and my sister don’t speak to me,” the 30-year-old might have sung on his debut album track I Never Learned to Share, but there appears to be no one in the music industry in 2019 not eager to take his calls.

Released last month, Assume Form marks Blake’s decade-long evolution into one of the most sought-after British songwriting talents, revered both as a solo conjurer of delicate, minimalist synth beauty and as a contributor to hugely anticipated blockbuster projects by chart behemoths. His climb to mainstream success has been so gradual (not to mention littered with awards: his 2013 album Overgrown beat David Bowie and Arctic Monkeys to the Mercury prize after he missed out with his self-titled 2011 debut) that it’s easy to forget how improbable it is.

Echoes of the emotional style of this wiry, white former dubstep DJ from Enfield are detectable in the music of everyone from FKA twigs to recent BBC Sound of 2019 poll winner Octavian. The cold contemplation of songs like Radio Silence and A Wilhelm Scream – with its repeated sighs of “I don’t know about my dreams any more” – could also be attributed alongside Lana Del Rey with helping usher in an era of pop unafraid to grapple with sadness and despair.

His rise to pop’s top table is made all the more remarkable by how little he’s compromised to get there, says Andy Whittaker, label manager at R&S Records, home to a string of agitated, clubby early Blake releases, including his Kelis-sampling breakthrough smash CMYK.

“The music James puts out now is still very left-field. When you listen to how his music has progressed, it’s a very natural progression. You can still hear some of the same synth sounds,” he points out.

When they met, through R&S artists and repertoire’s Dan Foat (now Blake’s manager), he was a “quiet, reserved, clever” Goldsmiths music student whose fizzing electronic experiments he’d often submit as exam coursework. A classically trained pianist from a young age, it was at university that Blake developed a passion for dubstep’s pulsing sub-bass and punishing drops, becoming a regular attendee of the now legendary DMZ club nights in Brixton, credited with helping the genre bloom into a UK music phenomenon in the mid-2000s.

“James and his peers – Mount Kimbie, Pariah and so on – took what they wanted from that sound as outsiders and twisted it into something more in connection with where they’re from,” says Whittaker. “They made it a little less dub reggae-influenced and brought a bit more pop influence into it. It was quite clever how they experimented with its boundaries.”

James Blake performing in 2016. Photograph: Venla Shalin/Getty Images

What happened next, as the star began melding more genres, incorporating mournful vocals and muted, melancholy synth progressions, paved a path towards a sound that makes Assume Form a curious title for a James Blake album. After all, since his debut release, 2009’s Air and Lack Thereof, his music has done nothing of the sort, refusing to calcify into one lasting shape or formula.

Blake slowed the tempo on his 2011 self-titled debut album, led by a sparse, dubby spin on Feist’s song Limit to Your Love, then expanded into hip-hop and Brian Eno-assisted ambient experimentation on its two follow-ups.

In 2019, Blake’s songs continue to whisk elements from electronica, gospel, soul, noise, folk, pop and beyond into an amorphous, evolving swirl of ideas. His lyrics have traditionally dovetailed neatly with this sense of formlessness, leading listeners through word-puzzle mazes of dreamlike poetic fragments on tracks like 2013’s Overgrown.

“I don’t wanna be a star, but a stone on the shore, a lone door frame in a wall, when everything’s overgrown,” he sang on its brooding chorus, chopping vocals into indecipherable, wordless collections of pitched-up vowel noises elsewhere in his canon, his songs’ moods always more graspable than their meanings.

This is a widely observed trait when it comes to Blake. In a 2013 essay, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, also known as k-punk, described his music as possessing a “quavering, tremulous vagueness, by no means clarified by lyrics that are similarly allusive/elusive … Blake [comes] off like an amnesiac holding on to images from a life and a narrative that he cannot recover.” The same essay sees Fisher goes on to liken Blake’s sound to “hearing a ghost gradually assume material form”, a phrase close enough to Assume Form to spark suggestions this album’s name was a subtle tribute to the respected writer, who died in 2017. Blake’s team tell me this was not the case.

Had it been a hidden nod, it wouldn’t have been a surprise: Fisher had been a lecturer at Goldsmiths, shared an appreciation for the same scenes that birthed Blake’s music and, well, mortality had been on the musician’s mind in the run-up to Assume Form.

In May 2018, Blake released Don’t Miss It – a typically tender piano ballad with warbling electronic flourishes full of lyrics describing his fight back from an emotional brink that left him a “ghost in a shell”. When one prominent publication derided it as more “mopey, sad boy music” from the artist, Blake broke social media silence to reveal he’d struggled with suicidal thoughts.

“I can’t help but notice, as I do whenever I talk about my feelings in a song, that the words ‘sad boy’ are used to describe it. I’ve always found that expression unhealthy and problematic when used to describe men just openly talking about their feelings,” he wrote.

“We are already in an epidemic of male depression and suicide … Please don’t allow people who fear their own feelings to ever subliminally shame you out of getting anything off your chest, or identifying with music that helps you,” he continued, rallying against the “disastrous historical stigmatisation of men expressing themselves emotionally”.

The statement was cheered by mental health advocates, and reframed the debate around Blake’s music, often called “blubstep” by media and dance purists unimpressed by its emotional rawness.

Happily, Assume Form finds the songwriter in his most positive state yet. In 2015, after the dissolution of his relationship with Theresa Wayman, guitarist in LA indie quartet Warpaint, he began dating actor/writer Jameela Jamil, star of NBC sitcom The Good Place.

Written as their relationship blossomed, the album – full of sumptuous, romantic strings and major key piano – spills over with honeyed declarations of love: “I thought I might be better dead but I was wrong … Have you ever coexisted so easily? Let’s go home and talk shit about everyone,” he croons on the affecting Power On, while the playful I’ll Come Too could be lifted from a version of La La Land conceived by Oneohtrix Point Never.

At 30 years old, 10 years after his first release, Blake has four critically acclaimed solo records and collaborations with a who’s-who of the American pop zeitgeist under his belt. Where does Assume Form suggest he might venture in his next decade of his career? “I think he could become like PJ Harvey,” predicts Whittaker.

An eclectic titan of British music, prone to “disappearing then returning with an incredible album” over and over: if that is the final form James Blake is to assume, he’s right on track.