Blood Orange – Essex Honey · Album Review ⟋ RAThe first Blood Orange album in six years deals with grief over an endearingly familiar blend of indie pop and glacial contemporary classical.Dev Hynes’ music can wig you out in subtle ways. Best known for his work under the Blood Orange moniker, his version of pop resembles a crisp, compressed memory, dug up from the deep recesses of your mind. The musican first rose to prominence in the early 2010s, producing forlorn hits like Solange’s “Losing You” and Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing.” With nods to ’80s funk and the layered synthscapes of quiet storm, these songs played out like lost karaoke classics, but also felt ahead of their time.

Perhaps the best example of the uncanny time warp effect of Hynes’ music is the infamous near-three-way in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers: although set in a hotel room in 2006, Blood Orange’s 2013 track “Uncle ACE” is still wafting from the radio in the scene. It could be a chronology fuckup, but then again, doesn’t every formative teenage kiss feel like it was soundtracked by Blood Orange?

After dedicating a few years composing classical and avant-garde music, including multiple projects exploring the work of NYC avant-garde titan Julius Eastman, Hynes’ new album Essex Honey is a full-circle return to the pleasures of pop music. But “pop” is a loose term for the genre-curious music he’s cooked up here—the feature list, after all, includes TikTok-friendly pop stars like Lorde and Caroline Polachek and experimental Unsound bookings like Mabe Fratti and Tirzah.

Hynes wrote Essex Honey, which layers serene R&B, gentle indie-rock, crunchy dance rhythms, and glacial contemporary classical, in the wake of his mother’s death. His fine mesh of reference and recreation—more distinct and in-your-face than on any previous Blood Orange record—lands as an attempt to connect with a past self through music, one of the most potent vessels for memory we have. The passage of time is a throughline in Essex Honey’s lyrics—”How can I start my day / Knowing the truth / About love and a loss of youth?” Hynes sings over the lonely guitar plucks on “Look At You.” The tone is disarming but remarkably unaffected.

If Hynes’ past albums felt like shoulder-shimmying through a busy neighbourhood, Essex Honey is evocative of clear, chilly skies and untouched fields—pastoral, expansive and ultimately, inviting.

Despite its lush and spacious palette, Essex Honey is slyly dense, giving a reservoir of recognisable references new life in a surreally modern context. Hynes makes nods to US rock bands like The Replacements, and interpolates ’90s indie icons like Elliott Smith and Yo La Tengo. But Essex Honey is still unmistakably his. Even when it’s one of many, Hynes’ distinctive and reedy voice cuts above the chorus, giving these tracks a familiarity that, at this point in his career, feels singularly comforting.

Essex Honey is a lot like a Rorschach test: you’ll likely hear in it the music that was dearest to you when you were growing up, whether that’s twee indie pop or pensive ambient. Piano ambles across most of the 14 tracks, as does piquant, arresting cello, although the latter instrument serves a specific purpose, halting the midtempo pop stride of “Vivid Light” and adding a mournful final note to the breakbeats scuffling beneath “The Last of England.” More than any other Hynes album, Essex Honey feels plainly sad, but it’s a testament to his skill as a writer and producer that it never comes off maudlin.

In that light, his direct musical references become urgent, like someone clutching old mementos in the hopes of turning back time. Hynes is smart enough, of course, to recognise that nostalgia is a trap, and that looking back only gets you so far. “Life is what you find hiding in holes,” he sings on “Life,” an album standout that wraps feathery vocal runs from Tirzah and Charlotte Dos Santos over warm, sultry funk grooves.

Of course, Essex Honey is never so glib as to suggest that grief is a linear process toward some kind of enlightenment. “The Train (Kings Cross),” a gutting collaboration with Polachek, is blackly comic in its appraisal of mourning, laid out over deceivingly chipper guitar chords. When he sings, “To see my phone / Nothing there can guide me home,” those lines, in a sense, sum up the purview of Essex Honey, which is graceful and insightful even at its most plainspoken.

This is an intense, gratifying zone for Hynes, even considering the searching, occasionally oblique nature of his past albums. But Essex Honey, with its cool, crisp textures and elliptical rhythms, is expansive and beguiling, an inviting place to rest in a chaotic year.

In “Countryside,” Hynes sings sweetly over sublime psychedelic rock—his reverbed falsetto bobs across washy new wave guitars and driving drum patterns. “Take me away to the countryside / In the field trying to hide,” he sings. It feels designed to work its way into the dark corners of your own memory, lodge itself in past joys and heartbreaks, and impress itself onto formative memories. Does it feel like you’ve heard this one before? That might be the point. Tracklist01. Look At You
02. Thinking Clean
03. Somewhere In Between
04. The Field feat. Tariq Al-Sabir, Daniel Caesar and Caroline Polachek
05. Mind Loaded feat. Caroline Polachek, Lorde and Mustafa
06. Vivid Light
07. Countryside feat. Eva Tolkin, Liam Benzvi and Ian Isiah
08. The Last of England.
09. Life feat. Tirzah and Charlotte Dos Santos
10. Westerberg feat. Eva Tolkin & Liam Benzvi
11. The Train (King’s Cross)
12. Scared of It feat. Brendan Yates
13. I Listened (Every Night)
14. I Can Go feat. Mabe Fratti & Mustafa