Maxwell’s music used to summon forth the thread-count adjectives: smooth, plush, sleek. Lately, though, he seems to be tired of living in this hothouse, and in the past few years, he has been freezing his music from the edges. 2016’s blackSUMMER'snight was his most mournful and buttoned-up release, and the synth pads on his new song, “We Never Saw It Coming,” are about as satiny as a frozen-over concrete stoop.

But then there is Maxwell’s voice, which emerges from this blasted landscape like a time-lapse flower blooming in the snow. The human voice tends to age pitilessly and severely; vocal chords scar and lose their elasticity. But not Maxwell: The further he steps back into the middle distance of his own music, the more minor scratches his throat takes on, the creamier and purer his falsetto rises upward. There is a moment about two-thirds through this somewhat staid, synth-and-piano ballad where his voice catches and he pushes it into a little catch and sob: It is a trick borrowed from someone else who once seemed as ageless. The song throbs with restrained heat, all the more intense for feeling fragile. You want to reach forward and cup his vocal take in your hands, to shield it from the frost.