“All I want is to talk to you,” Michael Kiwanuka sings on “Piano Joint (This Kind of Love),” as if the “you” had heard otherwise. Intimacy, for him, is fraught, full of potential traps. Anxiety pervades the London singer-songwriter’s third album, but he emerges a stronger artist, thanks to panoramic production by collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo. What on first or even third spin unfolds as an easy listen eventually reveals itself as a mournful and often despairing work: an album by an artist willing himself to believe people will offer the hope that institutions can’t but steeling himself for disappointment just in case. Doubt is his muse—and burden.

In the three years since Love & Hate, Kiwanuka’s popularity has only grown— the HBO miniseries Big Little Lies picked up that album’s “Cold Little Heart” as its theme song. His take on soul proceeds from the fuzzed-out serrated explorations of the Temptations’ psychedelic era and Terence Trent D’Arby at his most communal. Better still is his voice, which mixes Solomon Burke’s slow-burn urgency with John Hiatt’s gulp.

Kiwanuka mirrors Markeidric Walker’s cover art: grand, regal in its confidence, faintly androgynous. Its best songs are as direct as Kiwanuka’s gaze. The synth-anchored “Solid Ground” almost chokes on its anguish until the strings offer solace. “Piano Joint (This Kind of Love)” presents itself as a prayer in an empty room. “Living in Denial,” change tempos and chords after a couple of exploratory minutes; Kiwanuka treats songs like ecosystems that stretch and flower after sunlight and soil tilling.

Perhaps to keep things from skewing too “retro,” Danger Mouse and Inflo overdo the modernizing touches: the clinkety-clanks and distorted samples that sandwich “Final Days” distract from a chiming lament whose refrain marks Kiwanuka’s peak as a vocalist. They love these ideas so much that its follow-up “Interlude (Loving the People)” give them to you again, all three instrumental minutes of them. But the album offers compensatory pleasures, like “Hard to Say Goodbye,” in which Kiwanuka pledges fealty through and space time to a vague someone he has dared to love—an example of the album’s faint queer undertones. A studio-created ripple sound effect creates a sense of immensity. Always, though, doubt chews away at him: “And if I had a dream/Love would be sunshine for me.”

Offering no blandishments, no expressions of we’ll-get-through-this, Kiwanuka is a nerve-wracked, sustained act of whistling in the dark. Absent, though, is any hint of reveling: a tendency that often leads to soul rot. When Kiwanuka sings, “The young and dumb will always need/One of their own to lead,” he doesn’t volunteer.

Buy: Rough Trade

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