After putting together one of the most innovative records the world will hear this year, James Hinton began doing some worrying.

The producer’s motives were pure when he started working on Potential, his third full-length under the name the Range. Building on a template set up by 2013’s breakthrough full-length, Nonfiction, he spent endless hours scouring the deepest recesses of YouTube for clips by beyond-underground singers and MCs. Hinton sampled their work and set it to Sominexed hip-hop, microchip-powered R&B, and chilled-out EDM, creating a sprawling triumph in the vein of Moby’s landscape-shifting Play. But as great as Potential is, there were sleepless nights for the producer, who’s also a university physics graduate.

“My biggest worry was that people would misunderstand what I was going for,” says the engaging and thoughtful Hinton, on the line from New York. “Misunderstood in the way that people might say, ‘So what? You used all these YouTube vocals and I don’t see any strain of narrative, or any sense of weighing in on things in terms of the lyrics you chose.’ ”

But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Right off the top, the 27-year-old gives listeners a window onto his own fears about choosing art as a career with “Regular”, which samples a YouTube clip where London MC SdotStar intones, “Right now, I don’t have a backup plan for if I don’t make it.”

“I had a theoretical ambition for this record, and I’m so happy that that’s been talked about so much,” Hinton says. “It was important to me that this is a great record and that I’ve made something very musical and very complete. But the fact that the record is released in 2016 is not an accident, because I was trying to comment on the state of how people think about virality and how people approach pop music in particular. There are expectations that come with that, and I was trying to peel that away. That was an ambition, and it’s been a bit of a surprise that it’s been so well understood.”

Using algorithms designed to go into far corners of YouTube, he set himself strict guidelines, with viral videos, of course, immediately out of the running. Even if he was blown away by a YouTube performance, he wouldn’t use it if he got an unlikable-human-being vibe from the clip. If one were to extrapolate anything from this, it’s that Hinton hoped to make the world a better place with Potential.

Indeed, the album’s very name says something about his admiration for the obscure artists whose work he unearthed. That list includes young West Londoner Kruddy Zak, who posted a video of himself freestyling (pint-size hype man in tow) back in 2011. His lines “Everything’s changed/My life’s like a book but the page still remains” are set to swelling ’80s gauze synths in Potential’s inspirationally soulful “Copper Wire”. Kai Mars’s stunning a cappella cover of Ariana Grande’s “You’ll Never Know”, meanwhile, was spun into the sparkling, sun-flooded meditation “Florida”.

“What I’m hoping to expose with this record was the idea that not everyone wants to be a super-famous star,” Hinton says. “A lot of people just like to make their works, and it doesn’t mean that they aren’t good at it if they don’t have ambition. Or maybe the stars unlock on their ambitions. In the case of Kai from ‘Florida’, I can see how from prerelease to postrelease, how her whole tenor has changed, how she’s really excited about the possibility of ‘What will that song do?’

“Something has changed in her life,” he continues, “and there’s something special about that. If that at all kicks off something where other people start digging into YouTube the way I’ve done, I wouldn’t be mad at all. As much as I think I got good at algorithms to really see everything that’s good at this level, I’m sure I’m missing some search term out there. There’s just so much material—honestly, it’s a sea.”

The Range plays the Alexander Gastown on Saturday (May 7).