Dev Hynes, also known as Blood Orange, drew a large crowd to the Bomb Factory on Thursday night.
Andrew Sherman
Superfans of Grammy-nominated indie artist and composer Dev Hynes, who goes by the stage name Blood Orange, propped up their lawn chairs outside the doors of the Bomb Factory as early as 9 a.m. on Thursday morning. By the time the doors opened 10 hours later, the line crept down two blocks and around three corners, creating a Great Wall of Microshorts.
The crowd, which skewed younger, was fortunate to retain its effervescence because, after two openers, TLF Trio and Tariq Al-Sabir, Blood Orange took the stage at 10 p.m. and played a lengthy 90-minute set sprinkled with an equal number of deep cuts and TikTok-viral choruses. But good things are worth waiting for. Hynes could have taken the stage a thousand years late, and the groove of his bass still would’ve revived an incapacitated crowd. It was that good.
Syncopated booms of powerful basslines reverberated through the floor, absorbing through heels, traveling through innards, piercing the heart, inflating lungs and exiting back out the eardrums of the crowd. It was a full-body experience. The stoic artist, with limited theatrics, was enthralling in his casualness, obviously enjoying the sonic pulses emanating from his stage with coy, satisfied smiles.
Superfans of Blood Orange lined up outside hours before the show started.
The stage was lit by strobes and beams during the highest-frequency moments. In typical Thursday garb (a T-shirt and cargo shorts), the artist let the music be the focal point, offering the audience nothing to focus on but his superior talents. For the unseen moments – fingers racing over a keyboard, the furrowed brow of the background singer as she stretched for the high notes – a wall of screens offered close-ups of the most intimate details of performance. Between each song, orange light seeped onto the stage, allowing a sense of sunlight to set on Hynes again and again.
The show started tame, with soothing tracks like “Thinking Clean” and “Somewhere in Between” from his 2025 album, Essex Honey. At times, Hynes and his band sounded so good you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the sounds coming from the stage and an amplified studio-recorded track. Again, it was that good.
Early in his set, Hynes brought a one-man symphony to the Bomb Factory, erecting a bare-bones cello under a singular spotlight. The strings wept as musicality oozed from every pore of the unassuming artist standing center-stage. The crowd roared as he flexed his bow; it was a perfect harmonization of the languid flow of classical music and the staccato bass strumming that defines the artist’s music.
Blood Orange’s sublime new record, last year’s Essex Honey, sounded so sweet live.
By the third song, Hynes took his place in his pulpit behind a keyboard. From there, he flexed his abilities as a producer, happy to rely on support from his enigmatically talented background singers, Ian Isiah and Eva Tolkin.
As he rotated between stringed instruments and the keyboard, at times playing both at once, he bounced between the spotlight and a spot with the band. Hynes was eager to take the backseat, allowing Isiah and Tolkin to capture the crowd in their own right. The two together, as they eased across the stage with liquid movements, were as enrapturing as Hynes himself.
The show crescendoed as the band worked through some of Hynes’ more popular hits like “Best to You,” “Sutphin Boulevard” and “Uncle ACE,” pulling some of the songs out of tour retirement. For many of the songs, Hynes didn’t sing a single note, fading into the background as Tolkin and Isiah electrified the crowd, who probably would have paid just to see them. It can’t be understated: They were that good.
Hynes often took his place with the band behind a keyboard throughout the set.
By the time “Champagne Coast” in the set (the song went mega-viral on TikTok and has over 3 million uses on the app), the crowd was thunderous, with dedicated sore feet clinging to kitten heels and ballet flats, metaphorically bleeding orange from a worthwhile wait.
Hynes spoke very little throughout the show, allowing his compositions to speak for themselves. With appreciation for his band and his fans, there was very little left to be said. Words don’t exist for the pure joy Hynes and his band played with. As coolly as he came, the artist left without entertaining the thoughts of an encore. But it didn’t matter, because Hynes left little to be desired after allowing Dallas to hear the strums of his soul.