“As exciting as watching trees sprout” is decidedly a pejorative idiom. Still, it’s somehow the perfect way to describe these elegiac bops. Indeed, Devonté Hynes, on his fifth studio LP as Blood Orange, manages to make life’s contemplative moments seem urgent, celestial, and rehabilitative. No actual trees sprout on the elemental “Vivid Light,” a standout track about gazing aimlessly out the window. But Hynes details life’s vicissitudes with poetic exactitude. “But now it’s sad in May/A harder truth to take in (nothing makes it better”),” he coos. Never has a sunny morning seemed so arrestive, so hopelessly illuminative.
The album’s pointed cover, showing a dolorous schoolboy gripping a phone while holding a basketball, hints at the weighty revelations contained therein. The U.K. maverick seemingly wants to capture the random profundity of modern existence. “One of the things I really love about . . . this artwork is that the boy is holding a phone. And I think that’s super important,” Hynes related in a recent GQ interview. “I always think it’s funny that when people take photos now, everyone hides their phone. That’s just not real life.”
From the outset, Blood Orange conjured up sober images of everyday life via optimistic ditties that underscore freedom and empowerment. “Uncle Ace,” a delicious bop on 2013’s Cupid Deluxe, memorializes the queer youths who decamp in NYC’s A, C, and E subway lines. Freetown Sound, his 2016 landmark, features the spectral scorcher “Augustine,” which upholds identity, tying Hynes’s pursuits as a Londoner in New York to those of his Guyanese mother and his Sierra Leonean father in London. And though 2018’s ardent Negro Swan found Blood Orange tackling depression within the Black community, it contained such fast-tracking upbeat hits as the ever-zealous “Charcoal Baby.”
Expect less pumped-up bangers on Essex Honey, whose themes explore mortality and exile, made all the more illustrative in light of the singer’s mother’s death in 2023. But there’s a hearty sense of joy running through even the most dour moments here. It’s mostly about muted tastefulness until a bona fide earworm incites restless danceability. Hynes’s grateful curatorial instincts (emboldened by appearances from everyone from Daniel Caesar to an ad-lib-lilting Zadie Smith) only further the contemplative-exuberance aesthetic, making Essex Honey his most quietly explosive album.
“Thinking Clean,” a piano-driven stunner, kicks off with a blunt admission that “I don’t wanna be here anymore,” right before a plaintive cello washes over the soundscape, giving Hynes’s passive timbre the soothing gravitas of a world-weary psalmist. There’s stops and false starts, and a ticking-bomb hi-hat – all but piquing Hynes’s muted outbursts, as the beat builds to a danceable pace, conjuring a negative-space concerto for the strobe-lit dancefloor. To that end, if you’ve been dying to hear a frilly choral group go HAM on an 808-infused drumbeat, then the midpoint of “Mind Loaded” is just up your alley. The song’s first two-odd minutes – all sumptuous cello and angelic strains courtesy of Caroline Polachek – are pregnant with depth and basilica-worthy grandeur, wherein a phone on airplane mode, a late summer morning, and a fresh pack of cigs induce Hynes to observe, “Everything means nothing to me,” in a soberingly resonant gesture to Elliot Smith. Elsewhere, he celebrates another indie-rock hero with the haunting “Westerberg,” an ode to the Replacements frontman that quotes their classic song “Alex Chilton,” cleverly packing a tribute inside a tribute.
But Blood Orange’s mid-tempo bops are intoxicating, to be sure. “Vivid Light” revisits peak U.K. soul, boasting Soul II Soul–invoking drums, silky refrains (from an uncredited Zadie Smith), and rapturous flutes. The loping bass on “I Listened (Every Night)” invokes Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues,” but Hynes’s brand of blues are mighty fantabulous here, all things considered. “Within myself, I saw a darker light,” he admits before a driving four-on-the-floor pounce clears away the clouds, giving credence to Hynes’s sunny recollection that “I couldn’t see/Anything in between that’s soft/I wasn’t there at all/A dream is often solo.”
Save for its smooth sax solo, “Life,” a plodding self-help-style missive, leaves very little to desire. It’s the lone dud on this otherwise remarkable opus despite its eager assertion that “you can make it on your own.” But the sonorous “The Last of England” hits you right in the heart, drawing you into Blood Orange’s world of reflection and mourning. Few albums are this emotionally refined, giving us a real sense of grief — when life comes at you fast — while somehow distilling the “it is what it is” mundanity of seeing water drip down the drain. At the end of the day, Blood Orange catches more flies with Essex Honey.
