On “My World,” Jam City sounds like a project reborn. The opener of Jack Latham’s new LP is sprightly and lithe, like a Boz Scaggs song stripped bare and then left out in the sun for a while. The keyboards amble around the stereo field as each swoop of the bassline lugs the track forward. The whole instrumental seems to bend and curl around the three vocalists—Aidan, Bawo, and Ox Eye—who release a barrage of hooks: sung, rapped, and deadpanned. “My World” is a three-way pop song that has the clammy cool of Kelela’s “Frontline” (also produced by Latham) and the casual genius of Jai Paul’s “Jasmine,” speaking in musical fragments rather than full sentences: “Get up/Back from the dead like ‘Thriller’/Big fat killer/The lights get dimmer.” It’s nonsense, but it’s also a little exciting, as a voice coos, “I just wanna get fucked up/I just wanna get with you,” the sound of a drunken night out when you’re cycling rapid-fire through emotions. “My World” is a marvel of club-pop engineering on a level that Latham hasn’t reached in a while, a high that he spends the rest of the album almost reaching. It’s a soft-touch record where the pregame, nightclub, and comedown mix and mingle into a feel-good fuzz.

He wasn’t always this way. Latham left an indelible mark on UK dance music in 2012 with his debut album, Classical Curves, turning camera flashes and the squeak of basketball sneakers into dance music that melted Philly club and instrumental grime into one indestructible alloy. But Latham has spent the rest of his years wandering the hinterlands of pop music, as if he got bored of being miles ahead of everyone else. This new phase started with co-production for Kelela and bloomed with Latham’s awkward but hopeful Dream a Garden LP, where guitars and his own reedy voice took centre stage. He’s revisited dance music on and off since then, tracking his journey with the excellent Earthly mixes, but he sounds most at home when he’s working around a vocalist, and his fuzzy guitar playing and soft-edged synths have something to give them shape.

On My World, that shape is more seductive than EFM’s sometimes perfunctory dance-pop workouts, and more exciting than 2020’s bedroomy Pillowland. The instrumentals and vocals are subdued, coasting on a chilled-out vibe that’s all contoured edges and leather interiors, but there’s plenty of unusual stuff going on beneath that laid-back facade. The midnight-blue “Pure Vice” hollows out UK garage and leaves only its exoskeleton, like Prince did to funk on Dirty Mind. That lovely drum machine–guitar interplay that carries over into “Little Voice,” which skips from the Prince era to Dijon with its pitched-up vocals, soulful harmonica, and a slinky beat that lands somewhere between electro and freestyle. It has all the chintzy glow and happy-go-lucky ease of a CVS Banger, but with a modern sheen (and more oomph in the bottom end).

These songs are the clearest expression of Jam City’s kinda-R&B, kinda-club, kinda-pop musical personality. Constituent parts that once sounded like they were competing for attention now meld together seamlessly. “Trippin,” with its subtle beat science and lonely vocal from Luna Avelar, reminds me of Janet Jackson’s “Empty” as filtered through Take Care-era Drake: a dance track slowly taking form with wall-shaking kicks and rumbling basslines. “2am” is a floaty drum’n’bass tune that explodes into halftime before disappearing into a pleasant haze, and “Cash Fast Interlude” is like the “Club Thanz” of My World, a beatless mid-album reset that makes more of an impact than you might think. “Cash Fast Interlude”’s palette of whispery vocals, saxophones, and whispery vocals is a little cliché, but it’s also weirdly affecting—such is Jam City’s gift with simple elements, the same gift that made him such a crack club producer back in the day.

When Latham is working economically, he can dazzle as much as he ever did on the dancefloor. The title track has three singers stepping all over each other, but their clipped phrases, and the dead-simple instrumental, add up to something greater than the sum of its parts, much in the same way you can make a killer techno track with just three or four elements. Not every song on My World is a winner—gianna’s vocal on the otherwise excellent “2am” is grating and loopy—but they’re all doing something interesting, touching on his encyclopedic knowledge of ’80s music and his experience making pared-down club jams. When Dream a Garden came out in 2015, it was a shock to many dance-music fans, but now that style of music—impressionistic, fuzzy, and oh-so-’80s—is more popular than it’s ever been, thanks to the likes of Mk.gee, Jai Paul, and Dijon, whose music graces festival stages and critically acclaimed TV shows. It’s not hard to imagine Latham one day scaling those same heights, as long as he focuses on what he’s good at, and he’s getting better at it with every record.