Every Blood Orange album has its terroir. Cupid Deluxe used hazy 1980s R&B and new wave to celebrate love and found family in New York, Dev Hynes’ adopted home. Freetown Sound took a gamesome and personal tour of Black Atlantic history and music. And the anguished R&B of Negro Swan channeled the heartbreak of being Black and queer in America during the first Trump administration. While Hynes frequently works on music for films and other artists, he seems to save his most affecting work for Blood Orange. On Essex Honey, his first full-length under that name since the 2019 mixtape Angel’s Pulse, Hynes journeys to Essex, England to reckon with grief and memory.
The variously bucolic and suburban county, due east of London and often maligned in the UK, hasn’t come up much in previous Blood Orange songs. “Orlando,” from Negro Swan, makes one of the few references, depicting his relationship to Essex as intimately pained. “First kiss was the floor,” Hynes sang, referencing scrapes with childhood bullies. On his latest album, he again ties Essex to trauma—the death of his mother in 2023—but is even more inventive and probing in his response to hurt. Over gauzy arrangements of piano, breakbeats, and electric guitar, Hynes drifts through past and present versions of his home and self, finding new paths in old ruts.
The arrangements are lively despite the heavy subject matter. Backbeats thunder in and vanish like summer storms. Field recordings, woodwinds, harmonica, and strings float in and out unexpectedly. Guest vocalists are constant, and never pronounced. Hynes uses them like a choir, to shade in melodies and texture. You’d never know that’s Lorde or Zadie Smith singing without reading the credits, a subtlety that builds on Hynes’ frequent mentions of loneliness. Even with the support of a community, his grief feels individual and embodied.
The record plays like a recurring dream, threaded with sounds and voices on loop. The snow sheet of muted chords, breathy falsetto, and bass kicks that begins opener “Look at You” reappears on the mellow “Somewhere in Between.” The gruff cello coda that concludes “Thinking Clean” cameos on “Vivid Light,” and one despondent lyric—”I don’t want to be here anymore”—pops back up on the otherwise soothing “Westerberg” like an intrusive thought. As presented here, grief is less an explicit, timestamped feeling than an existential flickering. “It’s nothing like they said, it’s somewhere in between,” Hynes says on “Somewhere in Between,” his voice notably cheery. Perverse as it sounds, sometimes mourning feels good.
Alongside these internal repetitions, Hynes and crew layer in references to the music he enjoyed as a kid. Lorde interpolates Elliott Smith’s “Everything Means Nothing to Me” on the anxious “Mind Loaded.” Composer Tariq Al-Sabir and longtime Blood Orange collaborator Caroline Polachek riff on the Durutti Column’s “Sing to Me” for “The Field.” While Hynes has always been a collagist, these callbacks are more than nostalgia. “Regressing back to times you know/Playing songs you forgot you owned/Change a memory, make it 4/3,” he quips on “Westerberg,” which nods to the Replacements’ “Alex Chilton.” Hynes feels both warmth and distance as he revisits (and tweaks) his formative influences. It’s like he’s haunting his childhood.
In some moments, like on the shuffling “The Last of England,” Hynes seems to sing directly to his mother. “Sitting in the dusk of the room you fell/Asleep, anyway/Time has made it seem we can talk/But then they took you away,” he laments. Other times, he seems to speak to himself, offering comfort to the suffering boy and man. “Life is what you find, hiding in holes,” he advises on the shapeshifting “Life,” cryptic as a time traveler speaking to an ancestor. On “Vivid Light,” he peeks in on himself during the throes of grief-induced writer’s block: “Still you try and book a room/Hoping something comes to you/And still you’re dry,” he sings with a spring in his voice.
Hynes’ indelibly pretty upper register plays a big role in ballasting the joy and the pain. Although his voice doesn’t quiver with emotion and texture like those of serpentwithfeet, Sampha, and FKA twigs, it makes plaintive lines land as dreamy. The thick reverb on his voice when he sings, “Another morning here without you/Thinking where did our time go?” on the yearning “Countryside” turns the longing into something closer to reverie. Likewise, when he admits, “For the first time in my life/I can’t see too far,” on “The Train (King’s Cross),” he sounds more cogent than despairing. The flicker never stops.
That liminal feel is the core Blood Orange experience. Hynes’ restless twin urges to rummage through archives and document the present are arguably his signature, which is at heart a commitment to understanding and creating context. But Essex Honey marks the first time that he’s portrayed the present as a muse as alien and wondrous as the past. Sometimes home is a foreign land.
