James Blake’s route to pop stardom has been an odd one. First emerging in 2009 as a fascinating outlier in the then-flourishing dubstep scene, the Londoner’s idiosyncratic songcraft has gone on to earn him considerable crossover appeal. His self-titled debut album, released through Polydor in 2011, saw him reach new heights of success. There was a sense, though, that Blake was uneasy with his newfound celebrity (he alone declined to walk down the red carpet at that year’s Mercury Prize ceremony, for which he was a nominee). It was reflected in the album too, which felt just a little tentative, lacking in warmth and dynamism.

However, Blake has returned this month with a new single - the excellent ‘Retrograde’ - and details of his second LP, Overgrown, and he’s sounding more assured than ever. To honour the occasion here are some choice picks from Blake’s discography, charting his journey from the bowels of the UK dance underground to fringe-pop poster-boy status in five easy steps.

‘Air & Lack Thereof’

Blake’s debut release surfaced on Hemlock Recordings in 2009; a time when the imprint was instrumental in exploding the dubstep template into a cascade of intriguing new hybrids. ‘Air & Lack Thereof’ neatly sums up Blake’s contribution: the breakdowns are clearly influenced by the urban dread-scapes of foundational dubstep duo DMZ, but the recipe is spiced up with smart keys-work and a stuttering, stumbling halftime drop that continued to thrill dancefloors for months after its release.

‘Bills Bills Bills (Harmonimix)’

For a long time, the series of “Harmonimixes” floating around on YouTube remained unattributed. In reality, these playful re-imaginings of pop favourites, with their dextrous chord progressions and full-fat synth tones, couldn’t have been by anybody other than Blake. His version of Destiny’s Child’s ‘Bills Bills Bills’, which sees the vocal garbled, repitched and laid over an infectiously groovy dubstep template, is perhaps his finest hour.

‘I Only Know (What I Know Now)’

Blake has shown a desire to keep one foot in the underground that spawned him, and he continued to put out more dancefloor-oriented 12”s and EPs in tandem with the release of his first album. The Klavierwerke EP, released on dance label R&S, is perhaps the finest of these records, showcasing a newly refined, mournful hybrid of 2-step and house. ‘I Only Know (What I Know Now)’ is its highlight: Blake deconstructs a fuzzy piano and voice recording, re-imagining it as a quietly elegiac 2-step anthem, daringly minimal but exquisitely wrought.

‘I Never Learnt To Share’

The emergence of Blake’s debut LP in 2011 marked his arrival as a pop phenomenon. Its release was anticipated with a keenness bordering on hysteria, but the album itself fell a little short of expectations; Blake’s anaemic soul croon can be ghostly, captivating, but he struggled to achieve the force of personality required to carry off a full-length. Still, there were, undeniably, fine moments. ‘I Never Learnt To Share’ features the blending of frail falsetto and autotune that characterises the album; vocal lines are densely layered over a chord progression that noodles confusedly for the first half, before building to a spine-tingling pile-up of a climax.

‘Retrograde’

The first single taken from Overgrown is Blake through and through: bedroom-soul chords married with soft-edged synth work, framed in cavernous empty space. But our man seems more assured than ever before, his vocals bolder and clearer, his songwriting more direct. The buzzing, hornet-like swarms of synths over the chorus are the highlight: a touch both eminently Blake and subtly new, auguring well for the album to come.

Overgrown is due for release through Republic on April 8.

He is the audio king of the catwalk who has curated show soundtracks for all the fashion heavyweights, collaborated with artists and is an indie movie maker.

This playlist for me is like a scrap book. It is a chance to collect all the songs playing in my mind of late. I have been thinking about this music a lot over the last couple of months, listening to these songs even though I discovered most of these artists long ago and have followed them for many years. In the first O: by Tank, my playlist was more “autobiographique”. But this one is different. It is of course very personal, but is more about experiencing things now rather than looking back.

At the start of the playlist I have included Lady June’s ‘‘Touch Downer”. She was an English painter, poet and musician who was part of the “Canterbury Scene”– musicians from Kent in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I really love all the artists from that period: Kevin Ayers and all the bands from Canterbury. The iconic record Lady June’s Linguistic Leprosy was recorded in London with Brian Eno, Nico, John Cale, and Mike Oldfield (who at that time was very young). It represents a very interesting period and a very sophisticated creative moment.

Included in this mix are classical tracks. I could talk a lot about my experience with classical music but to be brief, I always find this music has a timeless edge. New music can disappear, never to be remembered but most of the great classical work remains. The track “Eclisse Snow” by Giovanni Fusco, who made music for director Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, finds a place here because he is one of my favourite directors and I had just used it in the music for the Prada men’s show this January. Another track used in the Prada show was “Le Dernier Amant Romantique” by Blaine L. Reninger. Reninger was part of the very famous and obscure band Tuxedomoon – a big inspiration for me.

But especially when I work in fashion, I always need to have a view on reality. “Crosses of Crossed Colour” by the Belgium composer Henri Pousseur was written in memory of Martin Luther King. It is always important to think about people that are fighting for a cause. Then to end this playlist it had to be something from Eliane Radigue. Her music is like a story that never ends. It is full of strength and fragility, strong and peaceful. It is just a beautiful piece.

About 600 miles north of Norway's northernmost town, across the Barents Sea, is Pyramiden, once a Russian coal mining settlement on the island of Svalbard, now an uninhabited ghost town. It's about as far north as you can get and, to put its isolation in context, for every four people who live on the island permanently, there's one polar bear. Yet a trip undertaken by the Danish band Efterklang to the island over nine days in 2010 provided both the sonic and emotional inspiration to create their fourth album, the appropriately titled Piramida.

"We were going on a trip into the unknown," Casper, Efterklang's vocalist, says of the expedition from the band's new home in Berlin. "We weren't really sure what was up there for us," Rasmus Stolberg, who plays bass, continues, "What Casper and I had talked about a lot was about having a specific location as a framework for the album, we saw these pictures of Pyramiden and it looked too good to be true."

"The first couple of days it was very much 'what the fuck are we doing up here'," he continues, "but looking back now, it's strange how long it took us to call the album Piramida because we didn't know quite how big a role this nine-day trip was going to have on the entire album."

After nine days of conducting field recordings in the city's abandoned swimming pools, on the world's northernmost grand piano and amongst the pipes, walkways and silos that litter the abandoned town, they took "thousands of recordings back to Berlin", where Mads Brauer, the group's "electronic wizard" began to create small sketches. "There was so much material to go through," Casper says, "so many hours of sounds, it was more like picking out memories. Remembering when we went to the tanks, or the lakes, and were throwing rocks, and that kind of guided him through the recordings to make songs out of these sounds."

Whilst the immediate reaction may be to talk solely about the trip to Pyramiden, it's the months the album took to actually create in Berlin, a city they'd just moved to, that characterises the record just as much. "The trip definitely defined the sound of the album - it's got a lot more space, and maybe has darker moods too, but the move to Berlin opened our sound up, I think," Rasmus says, before Casper jumps in to talk about the people they have met and worked with on the record: "Nils Frahm, and Earl Harvin from Tindersticks, and Andromeda with Daniel Glatzel, there's so many characters from the scene down here in Berlin."

"I think in the past we lacked that idea of collaboration," Rasmus continues, "and when I look back on this album, I'm very proud of some of the things we've done, the song Dreams Today, for example, which is like a dance between Nils Frahm and us." One track that encapsulates the fragile magnificence of the record is the Ghost, with its sombre horns juxtaposed against upbeat drums and Casper's hushed, almost spoken, refrain of "a ghost, a ghost, a ghost I never was."

Whilst busy working the sounds they'd captured into songs, they got a call from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, which began the third journey of the record for its premiere at the Sydney Opera House. "Suddenly we had the possibility of putting our epic ideas for the album into this other thing, the orchestra version," says Casper, explaining that they were more or less providing the orchestra solely with the foundations of the music, "we left the musicians with the scenery and let them fill it with actors. You'd think it'd be difficult to let someone else do their thing with the music, that it'd be holy ground, but it never really went that way."

Now the band are sitting in their new homes in Berlin, waiting for the album to reach the end of its story, from a nine-day trip to an island in the Arctic Circle, to the homes and record players of the general public.

"We're curious about how this thing we talked about in the beginning, how the album will be perceived with this story, how that'll be attached to it, and how it will all connect together, we're all sure that the music is the strongest we've made." Rasmus says. "This album has so many different colours, beyond the story somehow."

Piramida is out September 24th on 4AD. efterklang.net