“Rolling with the times/ Don’t be late!” sings Michael Kiwanuka, his warm voice riding across a propulsive bass groove and tangle of guitars. But what times is he rolling with? The many musical references on the 32-year-old singer-songwriter’s gorgeous third album are borrowed from an era before he was born. His guitar solos conjure psychedelic reveries and the kind of piping choral harmonies pop hasn’t had much use for since the days of the Mike Sammes Singers and the 5th Dimension.

Analogue instruments including Hammond organs, acoustic guitars, harps and pianos meld with strings and horns orchestrated with the lavishness of Burt Bacharach. As on his magnificent previous album, Love & Hate, (which debuted at number one in 2016), Kiwanuka concocts the kind of rich melting pot of soul, rock and funk explored in the Seventies by The Temptations, Isaac Hayes and Curtis Mayfield. He then stirs in the tenderness of Bill Withers and the political edge of Gil Scott-Heron.

In its original incarnation, this was a music born of protest; of dancing for dignity. Kiwanuka doesn’t disguise his debts to those forces. “And for the first time the community was confronted with Negroes in places they had never been,” a newscaster notes gravely over the instrumental linking passage Another Human Being – the tone and phrasing redolent of the Sixties civil rights era.