Blood Orange reaches into the past with ‘Essex Honey’
The album marks Devonté Hynes’s first full-length studio release since ‘Negro Swan’ back in 2018.
Photo: Vinca Petersen
After hinting at new work back in 2024 and the news that he would be joining Lorde’s upcoming Ultrasound World Tour, Hynes announced his new album earlier this summer. He marked this with the exciting release of the two new singles, Somewhere in Between and Mind Loaded, featuring Mustafa, Lorde and Caroline Polachek. These are just a flicker of insight into some of the impressive features on the album, with other contributors including Daniel Caesar, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Tariq Al-Sabir, Ian Isiah, Tirzah, Eva Tolkin, Kelly Zutrau of Wet, Liam Benzvi, Amandla Stenberg, Naomi Scott, and author Zadie Smith.
There is a simultaneously melancholic but reassuring quality to the sound of Essex Honey. It’s less high energy than Hynes’s earlier hits from Cupid Deluxe and Coastal Grooves, like the recently TikTok viral Champagne Coast, possibly popularised once more through its feature on the soundtrack of Sam Levinson’s hit TV series Euphoria.
The album explores the way music has inspired, healed, and interwoven itself through Hynes’ life. Although now based in New York City, Hynes returns to England through this album to explore grief and reflect on his experiences of growing up in Essex. This follows Hynes’s personal experience of grief after the loss of his mother in 2023.
This theme is at once introduced through the opening track, Look At You. Hynes’s soft vocals ponder loss and meaning over a heavy beat that eventually collapses into a slow guitar – a soft surrender to grief.
Hynes’s music has consistently transcended notions of genre, merging the sounds of indie, R&B, jazz and more. With Blood Orange, it is typically safe to expect the unexpected, and Essex Honey is no exception to this assumption.
On tracks like Countryside, Hynes keeps things interesting with surprising pauses, dramatic moments of silence that break through the sound. Other songs like Thinking Clean — where Hynes takes us back to being thirteen —introduce a high-tempo dance beat that suddenly ends with a burst of dark cello. This becomes a recurrent pattern throughout the album.
In The Last of England, Hynes remembers time in his childhood home in Ilford, and the deep feeling of absence that now shrouds the space. The track opens with a soundscape of voices muffled by metal clinking, children’s shouting, and a strange static. All of this contributes to the distant, dream-like quality that shrouds the album.
Seeping with nostalgia, vulnerability and longing, Essex Honey is a beautiful, transitional album that meets us as the summer melts into autumn.
Essex Honey is out now via RCA Records.
