“It’s always a bit like Ricki Lake at my shows,” Jessie Ware said with a wickedly droll smile. The mastermind of heartbreak elegance was midway through belting out a handful of her sumptuous tracks during a tiny acoustic set at London’s Ace Hotel this May. It was the south London artist’s first performance in two years, at which she spent as much time chatting with her fans as singing for them. She interrupted her set to pass the mic to Hannah, who’s travelled down from Scotland (“for six songs? Jesus!”), to quiz a fan about their upcoming wedding, and to offer a theory to a Greek audience member about why her R&B-leaning second album Tough Love didn’t sell in his home country. “I’d like to think it was because of the crisis,” she says, and he laughs. “It was more optimistic.”

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That’s true, sort of. Ware’s two albums to date have drawn links between after-dark bass music and stately soul, and, if they catch you at a certain moment, her songs like “Wildest Moments” and “Pieces” can feel like holding back tears until you feel your front door safely close behind you. Even though her tracks like “You & I (Forever)” explore the giddy highs of relationships, a subtle shift of Ware’s rich voice can flip a lighter track’s lyric like “I could wait all night” (“Imagine It Was Us”) from being a flirty come-on to something close to dancefloor masochism. Her currently-untitled third album will arrive later this year, with a strutting lead single, “Midnight,” out this week. The song pairs a “Bennie and the Jets” by way of “Super Rich Kids” piano line with brooding reflections on being in a long-term relationship (she’s been married to her husband Sam for three years), as well as foregrounding the desperate anxieties that can come with putting yourself in another’s hands: “Don’t let me fall through/ Now that I need you,” she roars.

The writing and production credits of her new album are a roll-call of the artists currently shaping pop radio, with artist and Justin Bieber songwriter Julia Michaels, Francis and The Lights, and Cashmere Cat joining her previous collaborators like Benny Blanco and Ed Sheeran. The teasing Spanish guitars of Ryan Tedder co-write “Selfish Love” would make a steamy soundtrack to a heated summer romance in the Basque, and one featherlight bop deploys Chairlift-esque synth wizardry. Still, a specific magic remains, in the way Ware’s lovelorn anthems can feel both painfully intimate and designed for arena singalongs. But the artist’s lyrics draw increasingly on her wariness, as a new mom, of the forces that can threaten a family — she’s already taken her 10-month-old daughter on the London’s Women’s March to protest systemic misogyny.

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Ware’s songs may suggest tumultuous undercurrents, but at her spacious and tastefully decorated east London home on a recent summer’s day she seems relaxed, curled up on her front room’s cozy-looking sofa with her hair in a loose topknot. In an adjacent room, her daughter naps, undisturbed by the family's adorable cocoa-colored French bulldog, Stanley, who scuttles around the wooden floors and yelps when anyone approaches the front door. During an hour-long conversation, Ware opened up about digging deep on her new music, working with Nicki Minaj on “The Crying Game,” and how, if step one is establishing a family home, then the subsequent — and more enduring — challenge is to protect it.