For every sublime, a ridiculous. In the wake of his self-titled debut, James was invited to join a choir including Antony Hegarty, Laurie Anderson and Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt to sing behind Lou Reed at Carnegie Hall for an emotional finale at a Free Tibet benefit, curated by Philip Glass. ‘The reason I still can’t play in mainland China,’ he notes. It was an experience only marred by the toke of a joint handed him from one of the cleverly obnoxious Brooklyn hip-hop trio, Das Racist, before stepping onstage. ‘There I am, my gangly 6’6” self, poking out the back of this ridiculously well-appointed choir and I’m like just feeling so awkward. And paranoid, of course. It was a bit like being in Dad’s Army.’

During the making of The Colour in Anything, James has found himself in other rarefied circles. There have emerged amid the undeniable global musical elite new friends, allies and admirers attracted to his bespoke musical mood, his certainty with sound. His influence has proved legion. There is barely a boy in his bedroom making beats that is not in thrall to some of Blake’s methodology and sound. At the upper musical tier, his music has proven irresistible to the international r&b community who came courting for collaboration.

There was the meeting with Kanye West in Hollywood’s Hidden Hills, for which Blake, not West arrived two hours late (‘they were perhaps a bit too Hidden?’). The LA playback for a new Beyonce record, with the artist’s daughter singing along in approval to a vocal hook of James’ composition (‘Beyonce said “that’s how you know it’s catchy”). There were the hours he poured into sessions for Frank Ocean’s forthcoming opus (‘absolutely the biggest influence on this record’). And the Transatlantic passing back and forth of alchemical music files with his good friend (‘the closest I have to a brother’) Justin Vernon, Bon Iver, which forms The Colour in Anything’s arresting, surprising, rousing, beautifully semi-intelligible centrepiece I Need a Forest Fire (‘even I don’t know what some of the lyrics are’). There were sessions in Rick Rubin’s Zen Malibu retreat, Shangri-La, where James watched with sanguine calm as Rubin spliced together his hours of improvisation, lying on the floor, scratching his beard.

‘It’s gone by in such a flurry that I didn’t sometimes stop to appreciate what was happening to me,’ James says now, looking back on the surreal moments that have punctuated his brilliant musical life. ‘I’ve been around some of the most unbelievable writers and musicians, choreographers and composers. Only now do I feel like I’ve had some of the blindfold taken off me where I can see what actually happened.’ James is a prodigious, gifted musician whose area of speciality – that flirtation point at which club music goes in for the clinch with Classical – has yet to be bound by genre.

The night at The Prince of Wales brought James back down to earth from his wandering musical star. ‘Big sound system in an old room? Boom. It was great.’ They proved cathartic on two counts. Firstly, he was getting toward the disquieting closing stages of finishing a record. It had a title, The Colour in Anything.

The construction of the record, mostly conjured in his South London bedroom studio, was clouded by early ravaging waves of self-doubt. ‘The album is, I guess, about my growth as a person,’ he says. ‘When you come back from a tour, you feel like you no longer have a purpose. There was a period of quite a lot of confusion as to what the fuck my role was. A lot of the stuff I wrote at that point I didn’t use. It wasn’t like happy mistakes. It was more that I really didn’t know what people want. Or I don’t know what I want.’ The Mercury Music Prize for Overgrown which sits on his mantelpiece was a temporary cause for celebration, but sounds like it further exacerbated some initial third album neurosis. ‘I knew there was expectation.’

Then there was the central issue of James himself. Someone told James that the problem with being in the public eye is that you become frozen in time at the moment you step into it. This triggered a further quiet crisis of confidence. Had the touring, the recording, the being at the centre of a creative and commercial process just been about arrested development, after all? The title track alludes directly to this. It is about approaching becoming a man, accepting responsibilities. ‘All I wanted to do was carry you for aching,’ he sings, ‘all I wanted was to mend things that were breaking.’ This is his most personal missive yet, as close to the piano man tradition as he has veered. ‘I struggle to find the colour in anything’ is a heartbreakingly transparent evocation of the blackness of male failure.

The silver lining at the end of a period of rabid self-assessment was the most redemptive of them all: love. ‘I met somebody in the last two years really who completely turned my attitude and general outlook around and essentially made me grow up very fast in a way I hadn’t been made to before.’

James was brought up an only child in Enfield, North London. ‘It’s a solar system in which you are the sun.’ He says he has been useless in relationships before. ‘Very selfish. And allowed to be selfish.’ A new girlfriend began to challenge him to look harder and deeper at his life, to pull him up on failings, to correct himself. ‘In order to keep the person you want to be with, there were a lot of things about me I had to change. I met somebody who I very much appreciate for walking in at that point. Because my life was in a very untended state.’

As the album began to take shape, James Blake found himself asking hard questions of himself, in the company of someone who allowed him to do it. A record of self-reflection, that bridged his interior and exterior lives, about the communication difficulties shared between two people, sorting yourself out, learning to love and about simply growing up took arresting musical shape. The recurrent themes of miscommunication are set out transparently on the poignant album opener, Radio Silence, then further developed on the unlikely jolt of Put That Away and Talk To Me, I Hope My Life and Noise Above Our Heads.

The second byproduct of the Brixton night with 1-800 Dinosaur was more generational, tying to an emerging strain of maleness James directly connects to. A sweating night in a little pub, with banging music across the dysmorphic spectrum of a dance music gradation system in eclectic 21st century free-fall, confirmed to James something he has suspected for a long time among musicians of his ilk. That those experimenting at the outer edges of sound, on that magical hinterland between electronic experimentation and classical composition, have a subdued, sometimes melancholy overtone to their music on account of having missed the joyous mysteries of acid house.

‘As much as that sounds like a joke, I think it’s true,’ he says. ‘I’m gutted I missed hardcore and raves in Epping Forest or around the M25. Travelling sound-system parties? I missed all of it. We missed the drugs as well. My generation got the wrong ones.’ Accounting for some of the minor key discordancy and sub-bass experimentation at the challenging end of his work, James Blake’s music can feel occasionally like the most wilful distillation of the generation that missed out on the last proper offline teenage rampage. His music is full of shadows because he was born into the half-light, coming of age when the lights went on at the party. James’ generation were left to placate the woeful worries of turning boy-to-man without the comfort blanket of a brand new shape for bacchanalia. ‘We were 20 years too late,’ he says. ‘And,’ he laughs, ‘I still don’t really know what becoming a man is.’

Because James Blake is an artist whose music doesn’t depend on the ardour of youth, because it can be sedate in its beauty and rage, with each record his craft acquires a new vintage. The Colour in Anything might yet be considered his masterpiece. The influences are strange and new. Alternate listens suggest David Sylvian, Chet Baker, Laurie Anderson, Jeff Mills or Arvo Part. There are still genetic traces of the key records that marked his initial predisposition to make music – D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago and Antony and The Johnson’s I Am A Bird Now – but they’re now so entrenched in his DNA to sound almost invisible. ‘Just growing up is almost synonymous with self-improvement. So I think that’s what this album is about: maturing and shedding a slightly childish skin and trying to become happier in the process.’

There are tangible signs that James Blake is growing into an artist with tenacity, fresh perspectives and endurance, perhaps in the mould of a post-club Peter Gabriel brushing the detritus from the dancefloor as the lights go up. When James started making records, they were full of distorting effects on his true voice. There was a sense that he may be hiding not out of purely experimental motives but also a sense of young, mannish embarrassment. ‘Absolutely.’ At 27, he is at that fascinating precipice where adulthood itself becomes a matter of fight or flight. ‘I was incredibly self-conscious about how my voice came across to other people. I was incredibly self-conscious, full stop.’ Amid all the lessons that love and learning have taught him, the art of letting go was the least expected. ‘It was convenient that I wanted to experiment because it helped me to hide away. I spent a long time in the wilderness. I’m out of it now.’

With the help of Rubin, Ocean and Vernon, even perhaps through the countless requests that came through to collaborate, James has found himself by learning to let go. The transparency of songs like My Willing Heart and Modern Soul would not, could not have happened before. “With Justin, I wasn’t that interested in making music with him, initially,” he says, “I just wanted to be his mate.” The recording happened anyway. With Rubin, it was about allowing a second pair of ears in at the crucial development stages of building a new world on record. “The first time I was at Shangri-La, one of my band came to visit. I came out in a white t-shirt and slack trousers, no shoes and socks and I looked like I actually was at rehab or I’d joined a cult. Oh, James has changed.” It was true. He had. With Frank, it was about building a mutual support system. “I love Frank. He’s magnetic. The myopic viewpoint of my music and maybe my life slightly got in the way for a second. Then I caught myself. I stopped being an only child on this record.”

For James Blake, the transparency of light now beckons. It may yet be the colour in everything.

It seems vital then that the two monikers be male and female, and begin with the letters A and B - like two sides of a record, or the genders, they are unique, but find unison in one another. A truism that extends to Arthur Beatrice's two distinct, dual vocals.

Founding members Orlando Leopard (vocals/instruments) and Elliot Barnes (drums) discovered early in their school-formed friendship, and musical partnership, that their opposing views would take them in interesting and often unpredictable directions. The pair were looking to introduce a new dynamic to their songwriting when they met and enlisted Ella Girardot (vocals/keys), after hearing her perform All Saints’ Pure Shores in the school talent contest. Brother Hamish Barnes (vocals/bass/guitar) joined a little later, quickly providing another point of creative tension when he began contributing songs that soon became as vital as anything before.

“When a person pulls one way, and another pulls in a completely different direction, it's possible to find something in the middle without compromising... something a lot more interesting,” is the way Orlando sees the process, and this core idea of creation from conflict is intrinsic to the band’s writing; each member bringing their own ideas to the rest to be shaped by their differing input. It's not a typical approach, with Elliot's words interpreted and made real in different voices, through Orlando and Ella, but it works, and while the drummer may write with individual intention, the actual words are deliberately open to interpretation by both singer and listener.

Ella refers to these lyrics as being "Ambiguous...", and they may seem as such, especially when twinned with seemingly unrelated titles. Each song name is in fact intended to encourage the listener to reconsider the words on realisation that the title words are always absent. “...It’s meant to be a ‘rupture’ of sorts - that thing that makes you realise that something isn’t quite right, and you have to look at the whole song again to work out why it has its name.”

Girardot’s vocals are unaffected by lyrics written largely by her male mates; while at times cold and disassociated, they are more often warm and always passionate, her voice leaning against Leopard’s reserved tones in a way that again forces the listener to ask questions of the songs’ motivations. While it's natural to assume a direct dialogue between the singers, it's quickly apparent this is not the sound of star-crossed lovers duetting. Instead, the occasional sharing of vocals only highlights further the different perspectives, aiming to push the pop-focussed songs into less familiar and comfortable territory. There are occasions and parts written from the male perspective and deliberately designed to be sung by Ella... Arthur Beatrice allows for different interpretations, throwing every songs presumed subject matter in to question.

A reluctance to release material before it's been worked, and then re-worked, to the point of obsession has led to little and infrequent output during their formative years, but it has granted the band a sense of calm awareness and careful consideration in everything they do: from a painstakingly pieced-together aesthetic through to the creation and curation of their own night, Open Assembly and further still, to self-releasing their only two previous singles 'Midland' and 'Charity' on Open Assembly off-shoot label, OAR.

For a band whose music is composed of such wildly differing elements, who’s writing comes from so many perspectives and musical influences, and in an age when so much is served up so soon, they've maintained a hold of the reigns and remain firmly in control. They don’t look to be loosening that grip any time soon.

For one thing, they only began as a band when their sonic experiments in improvising three-minute pop songs - verses and choruses, yes, melody and arrangements, no - exploded into something deeper and darker.

They’re as comfortable discussing Guy Debord and Arthur Schopenhauer as they are John Coltrane and Black Sabbath. Their Twitter feed thrums with hymns to Mei Leaf tea and conscientious vegan messaging alongside plugs for Notorious B.I.G. and tributes to legendary jazz-funk drummer Alphonse Mouzon.

Will Ritson (vocals, lyrics) is a visual artist, writer and poet and has his own book publishing company. Multi-instrumentalist Matt Ritson (keys) is a stellar photographer. Jonny Tams (bass) spent his teens fiddling with broken synths before going on to work with producers like Spike Stent and Stephen Street, as well as artists including Björk and Russell Haswell. Kai Akinde-Hummel (drums) is fluent in three languages, and his grandfather was part of Nigerian trumpeter Dr Victor Olaiya’s band, the same one Fela Kuti played with. Sash Lewis (synths) has patched modular synths with the likes of Four Tet, Caribou and Floating Points, and has, as they say, “a history…”

As Formation, they make a noise that is the single most explosive and joyously angry thing you’ll hear for a long time. So that’s numerous remarkable things already and we haven’t even mentioned Yes or the Wu-Tang Clan yet.

Brothers Will and Matt grew up in a South West London household where one parent loved Northern Soul, disco and funk while the other loved choral music, opera and Queen. For seven years, Will and Matt sang in church choirs four times a week – church being a venue they appreciated more for its acoustics than its message.

In his youth, Jonny worked in a record store in Wimbledon, recommending classic albums that would inspire the brothers. Later the three would work in a warehouse together, sucking down every great record they could squeeze onto the shared iPod, quietly brewing the first Formation EPs.

Meanwhile, Kai shared the brothers’ orchestral upbringing, playing with orchestras and jazz bands, sporadically working on projects with Matt, until he was drafted into the band while still living in Spain. Sash was sharing studio space with Jonny and joined the live set-up to “tune” the synths before a more serious involvement with the band was born.

A local scheme - the Merton Music Foundation - allowed the brothers to rent affordable instruments and so drums, clarinets and saxophones entered the house at an early age. Up in Camden, Kai was already playing in - and touring Europe with - orchestras and jazz bands.

“Playing in orchestras and in churches opened us up to so much more music,” Kai nods. “It was those places that taught us how to communicate.”

Others took a less conventional approach. Jonny, whose young mind was being blown by early music software, would record things falling over until he’d perfected the art. Meanwhile Sash would sit around in his mate Kieran Hebden’s bedroom, discovering samplers and drum loops as “pure magic” unfolded.

In their early teens, the boys soaked up Pink Floyd, Free, Yes and Jimi Hendrix. And it’s here we meet the very heart of Formation: on the left; groove, on the right, power; and in the centre, know-how. And while metal helped shaped them as teenagers, you’ll not hear that influence on Look at The Powerful People as the record doesn’t feature a single guitar. What you will hear is the bass as lead, percussion as lead, drums as lead, vocals as lead, the groove as lead – everything where it’s needed.

And now there’s an album - named after Gino Vanelli’s 1974 pop-soul masterpiece. Co-produced by the fast-rising Adele and The Strokes engineer Ben Baptie and genre-defining house producer and DJ Leon Vynehall, Look At The Powerful People shares the same redefining air that lit-up Andrew Weatherall’s work on Screamadelica. And while Look at The Powerful People might appear to be flashing its arse at Trump and May, it’s about flipping that drive around to create a gang with an inner power.

“People have a collective power,” Kai says. “We’ve always been on the fringes. We’re misfits, never a member of any scene. So we’ve built our own gang and if people want to join us they can.”

Take “Back Then,” a euphoric ball of heat and fire, bejewelled by Jonny’s production skills, bouncing on a thick Motown-like groove. It skirts time-wasting nostalgia but still thrills to the memories of being care-free enough to spend weeks building skate-ramps and stealing trolleys. “Buy and Sell” is sheer aggression, a fantastically nasty, jagged piece of commentary tackling consumerism and advertising.

“Drugs” pulses wildly, it’s not an anti-intoxicant song as such, more of a be-aware-of-what-you’re-doing song. Elsewhere, “A Friend” is a lunatic pop blast, like a psychedelic Killers stripped of their showbiz glitter and jacked up on cheap coffee and cigarettes.

If any song were to sum this brilliant group up it would be “On The Board”. It’s actually about chess, which puts it in a small group with “Your Move” by Yes and the Wu-Tang’s “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’”.

“Us, Yes and Wu-Tang,” smiles Will. “That’s the magic pyramid of Formation! The first five Yes albums and the first three Wu Tang albums - I could throw everything else away. It doesn’t get more ‘us’ than “On The Board”. I wanted to make a tune someone else might sample - and this might be the one…”

Formation are something else. Something real. Something you can trust. They bleed Stax and Curtis Mayfield, Pantera and Sly Stone, Gil Scott Heron and Vaughan Williams. They’re built on the bones of visionary musicians and the desire to connect that’s within us all. Look at The Powerful People is “a diverse record from diverse people for a diverse crowd,” Matt says, summing it up to perfection. 2017 just got a whole lot brighter.

His first release, Lend Me Your Skin, a collection of songs inspired by the early 90s guitar sound of Pixies and Nirvana was self-recorded in Falmouth and became the catalyst for his relocation. Exploring the emotional disconnect and emptiness of early adult life, the EP; particularly the debut single ‘ Anxious?’ gained a lot of traction, attracted new audiences and press plaudits.

Gillbanks continued to gain traction in 2016 with his London shows, becoming known for his noisy, dynamic live sound. Communion Records released ‘Childhood’ which was highly received and in turn helped secure shows at The Great Escape, Field Day, Glastonbury, and Citadel.

Quite literally played, too: exposed to life on the road and frequently falling asleep to the vibrations of heavy bass coming from the home studio, Mabel quickly realised that her family were a little different from the others on the block (her Mum and Dad are Neneh Cherry and Massive-Attack producer Cameron McVey).

Mabel was less than forthcoming in her own ability, however: she dauntedly refused to play anyone bar her best friend any songs until the age of sixteen, and studied production and music theory at college in Sweden until late last year, when the family returned to London. Mabel unveiled her first track, ‘Know Me Better’, in July 2015. It’s an infectious and immediately-refreshing introduction, in her own voice: mixing big, Lauryn-Hill-inspired beats, soulful keys and little more than Mabel’s rich, crystal-clear vocal, ‘Know Me Better’ is about not judging a book by its cover, and the deeper understanding achieved when you let your guard down in a relationship. Spurred on by her grandmother’s advice to her Mum when she was pregnant – to never separate life, and that family and creativity can work together – Mabel has stepped out of the shadows as one of the bright young talents of 2015.

Instead, rather its the atmospheres conjured and the unchartered territories explored within each little marvel of a track that comprise his unique vision. The space he creates is mind-bogglingly vast, and one where the brutalist greyscale of his native metropolis meets the warming slipstreams of his bucolic, often amphibious daydreams to alien effect. In his world near-choral incantations battle and marry with minimalist jazz tones, post-rock layering and swaggering beats and couplets in a way that's sometimes experimental, but always enveloping.

Born and raised in Croydon, Jamie discovered at an early age what a powerful form of escapism music could be for him. Joining a successful local choir aged-11, he not only discovered the incredible tone of his own singing voice (yes, those seraphim sounds on 'Softly Draining Seas', are him on backing vocals), but the immersive, transportive properties of truly grand musical composition. "There's something really powerful about performing a huge piece of music that's had so much time and thought put into creating it," he says. "It becomes something you can totally lose yourself within." It was these newly stoked fires that drove him to take his music seriously, earning a place at his local music school and honing in on piano as his primary instrument throughout his teens. It was here that he and his peers began first obsessing with the never-ending vortex of jazz, first with the greats, but before long with the avant-garde minimalism of composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, whose sense of space and adventure leave their mark across 'I Will Be Cold Soon'.

It was also there that he and his teenage friends, as many do, cultivated a love for the craft of hip hop. Certainly there's a street culture that runs throughout his sonics, from the foundations of Premier and Dilla, through to more evolved UK bass sounds like Mount Kimbie. Before long Jamie would become the one of the most accomplished beat-makers within his peer group, leading to a poignant collaborative relationship with classmate Archy Marshall aka King Krule. Fitting then that this debut will be released via House Anxiety, the same imprint that gave the world Marshall's owndebut in Zoo Kid's 'Out Getting Rib's'. When dealing with musical depth and tender years it's always easy to label this things prodigious, but what's harder to pin-point and more exciting to consider, is if this EP release represents Jamie Isaac's first chapter, then what could the rest of this story possibly resemble.

It is music about burying yourself in an avalanche of words and warm bodies in an endless search for the right ones.

New song Together finds Tourist at his most dance orientated, an approach he hinted at on his work earlier in the year. Opting to work with sampled vocals, the balance struck between the soulful vocal contributions of his collaborators exemplify his work as a forward thinking producer alongside many of his contemporaries.