Michael Kiwanuka is a mass of contradictions and all the better for it. He’s a self-doubting soul man whose second album, Love & Hate, recently went to No 1 despite being composed of gnarly songs apparently pulled from the darkest recesses of his mind and the pit of his stomach.

A black dog suffuses his oeuvre, and it shows. Kiwanuka’s rich, grainy voice sounds as if it is hewn from oak, and yet he stands pained and clenched, as if forcing the reluctant words to emerge. His retro-leaning blues-soul is mannered and meticulous, but at its core his voice is raw with ache and need.

“I can’t stand myself,” he growls on the poignant opening Cold Little Heart, and not for the last time you feel as if you are eavesdropping on personal turmoil. Songs simmer and brood but rarely cut loose. On the visceral Falling, he writhes in the throes and self-loathing of a failed love; the quest for identity that is the troubled Rule the World was clearly the product of a long, dark night of the soul.

Even when his confessional soul flirts with lapsing into soft rock, his personal intensity never subsides. After a clunky encore trudge through Prince’s Sometimes It Snows in April, Kiwanuka closes an engrossing evening with Love & Hate’s defiant dismissal of his demons: “You can’t take me down.” As ever with this sublimely tortured artist, it sounds difficult and very real.

• At the Limelight, Belfast, on 14 October. Tickets: 028-9032 7007. Then touring.