The first time I Googled “James Blake,” soon after the release of his stellar 2010 debut EP “The Bells Sketch,” I was surprised to learn that there was also a tennis player named James Blake and that he was significantly more famous than his musical counterpart. Now, after five EPs and a hugely successful debut album, the musician Blake has blown up, and his title as the king of post-dubstep is now virtually unchallenged.

Blake’s second album, “Overgrown,” out this week on Republic Records, finds him re-traversing the wide range of styles that he’s explored on his prior releases while negotiating a bit of new territory as well. The titular song starts the album off solidly enough, but things really kick off with “Life Round Here.” Over a beat strangely resembling “Cry Me a River,” Blake pulls out all of his production tricks and croons well enough even to pull off the ridiculous lyric, “Everything feels like touchdown on a rainy day.”

“Retrograde,” the album’s lead single, brings light traces of Blake’s dubstep roots into the neo-soul genre. The backbone of the song is a beat largely inspired by D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar,” but Blake’s impassioned vocals and the harrowing synths that dominate the second half of the song make the track undeniably a Blake original. The song finds Blake taking his talents into new pastures with stunning results; it is his best track to date and the strongest song of 2013 so far.

Sandwiched between the excellent “Life Round Here” and “Retrograde,” “Take a Fall for Me” isn’t exactly a bad song, but it would take something special to make a rap track sound anything but utterly lost on a Blake record. Post Wu-Tang RZA is not something special. Blake’s not much of a lyricist, but RZA’s verses on “Take a Fall” are downright corny, which is a shame because the first 34, RZA-less seconds of this song are quite promising.

“Overgrown” is about a minute longer than Blake’s eponymous debut, but it feels shorter. This is due in part to the fragmentary nature of “Take a Fall for Me” but also to the significant scaling back on negative space. The closest Blake comes to giving us downtime here is on piano ballad “DLM,” which might as well be titled “Give Me Another Month.”

The album then mellows out a bit before the end with closing tracks “To the Last” and “Our Love Comes Back,” which evoke Blake’s post-debut album EP “Love What Happened Here” as well as Rhye’s fantastic debut album from earlier this year. These are very good songs, to be sure, but the fact that they can so easily be paralleled to different aspects of Blake’s earlier work make them feel mostly like a refashioning of his young but already diverse repertoire; they seem to be his way of saying, “Look upon my works.” I’m more interested in his works not yet completed, in which one of the most undeniably talented artists of our generation will take us next. “Overgrown” is a great step into new territory for Blake, and in his next releases, I predict (and hope) we’ll continue to see his abilities expand.