Zak Abel can hear what a great song needs.

It’s propelled him to multiple collaborations with some of the world’s biggest dance producers. Freedom with Kygo (193 million streams). Beautiful Escape with Tom Misch (88 million). Ten More Days with Avicii (29 million). Unmissable with Gorgon City (26 million). Bad with Don Diablo (88 million). The Power with Duke Dumont (51 million). Those names, and those numbers, speak to both the appeal of the Londoner’s emotion-tapping and soulful vocals, and to the flexibility and range of his compositional skills – and, frankly, easygoing but weapons-grade niceness as a human being.

“When you're writing dance songs, it's quite general in the lyrics,” says Abel. “Because, oftentimes, you're singing to people who just want to dance. So what's more important is the melody and the simplicity of it, to reach the most amount of people in a very immediately impactful way. Whereas in my own music, it's more about me and my story.”

And on that point, Abel can also hear what his own music needs.

It’s there in What Love Is, the 27-year-old’s sparkling debut single for BMG. Think: George Michael for Generation TikTok, an all-rounder with an instinctively soulful, funky feel and ability to fast-track an ear-wormy chorus. In vocals recorded in the high-tech surroundings of his living room of his former flat in southwest London, it showcases, too, Abel’s incredible singing range.

Aged 21, before he’d had a chance to release his debut album (2017’s Only When We’re Naked), he was diagnosed with otosclerosis, which is essentially the overgrowth and brittleness of the stapes bone, and what befell both Beethoven and all-time-great vocalist Frankie Valli. That means it can't vibrate, which means you can’t hear… anything in that ear. 

For a kid at the start of his music career, the diagnosis was devastating. Zak decided to go for an operation to replace the stapes bone with an artificial implant – a high risk bet for anyone, far less a musician, “because you have no idea what the results are going to be. While it may restore volume, pitch can be really affected. And in fact, once I'd had the operation, for about six months to a year afterwards, I couldn't tell if I was in tune. I had to learn how to hear pitch again. That's something the doctor doesn't tell you,” he adds with a wry smile.

The outcome, on the one hand, was great. “About 95 per cent of my hearing on my right ear came back, in terms of volume. But music isn't just about volume. Non-musicians, most of the time, can hear volume. But the actual retraining of pitch and stuff, that took a while. Even now, it's not necessarily as good as it used to be. But I'm still generally able to sing in tune.”

Since signing with BMG last summer, Zak Abel has been hard at it, working on his genuinely long-awaited second album, a set of songs that channel his life, loves and influences like John Legend, Sam Smith and Paulo Nutini.