The desperate center of Jessie Ware’s debut album, “Devotion,” is Talking in Water a languorous and arresting tragedy about punishing oneself so that someone less worthy might live. Over gaseous, melancholy synths Ms. Ware unfurls her tale heavily.

“I wish I was you, a piece of gold at the bottom of the blue/Too heavy to swim, but too beautiful to lose,” she yowls regretfully. At the chorus she’s all resigned exhale: “I’m taking in water for you, my love/Pulling you out, I’ll take the blue.”

Your Drums ,Your Love the latest single by the duo AlunaGeorge — like Ms. Ware, from London — takes the water theme even more literally. The opening synths recede like ebbing waves, and the vocal part of the hook has a bit of viscosity to it, over which the singer Aluna Francis sings, with surprising cheer, “I’ve been treading water for your love/Whether I sink or swim, it’s you I’m thinking of.”

Water cools, and water soothes, and water obscures. That forward-thinking British soul music is hitting an amniotic phase isn’t so surprising: after the club always comes the comedown

Ms. Ware’s sensuous and stirring “Devotion” (PMR/Island), and the limited but impressive output of AlunaGeorge (which also includes the producer George Reid) repeat a familiar pattern in British soul music, which in its more mainstream forms has in recent years tended toward the retro-minded, like Amy Winehouse, and Adele

Ms. Ware got her start singing for restrained electronic music producers like SBTRKT, though early on she was trying to do too much.

Quickly, though, she learned to ooze into the beat.

On “Sanctuary,” from SBTRKT’s debut album, she’s basically just sighing.

Working in that realm also got her comfortable with propulsion, which is why “Devotion,” while no means a dance album, has the outline of club music on it, a trick similar to the one pulled off in recent years by the British singer Jamie Woon, who starved dubstep down to an unexpected folk core.