Blood Orange should be the last artist to get the TikTok bump — not because Dev Hynes doesn’t deserve it but because the music that he makes under his Blood Orange alter-ego is so heady and immersive that it’s hard to imagine it making sense in 20-second chunks. Blood Orange has hooks, but they’re the kind of hooks that feel like crawling into a warm bath. You want to luxuriate inside those hooks, not to encounter them in barrages of distracting media blips. But the TikTok effect has come for Dev Hynes. A couple of weeks ago, Blood Orange’s 2011 song “Champagne Coast” went platinum, while 2018’s “Charcoal Baby” went gold. Those late-breaking successes feel utterly random, but they make their own kind of sense. If you’re a kid in search of a hazy, indolent late-summer vibe, you won’t find a better supplier of that feeling than Dev Hynes. Just wait until all those kids hear Essex Honey.
Essex Honey is the first Blood Orange album in seven years — since Negro Swan, the record that gave us “Charcoal Baby.” In that time, Dev Hynes has always felt present, not just because of TikTok but because his particular form of despondent bliss casts a long shadow. Hynes has soundtracked movies and TV shows, and he remains an in-demand collaborator. Just in the past couple of years, he has added his touch to big records from Vampire Weekend, Erika de Casier, Jessie Ware, Turnstile, and Lorde. His genre-fluid sensibility is everywhere you look these days, but it seems to exist out of time. Essex Honey is a big-swing record. You can hear that Hynes has a major-label budget at his disposal and famous collaborators in his phone contacts. But the best way to listen to Essex Honey isn’t to pick through the voices and allusions and credits, though that can be fun. The best way to hear it is to let the album wash over you, to be swept away.
Dev Hynes hasn’t done any press behind Essex Honey. As far as I can tell, his only real comment on the album is in the Instagram post where he announced it. In that video, Hynes’ subtitles mention an unspecified loss that he suffered and an epiphany about the comforting power of music, one specifically brought on by hearing Sufjan Stevens’ “Fourth Of July” on laptop speakers. I don’t know what loss Hynes suffered; it’s not my business. Essex, the place of the title, is the county outside London that Hynes and Charli XCX and Damon Albarn and Crass and a bunch of others call home. From what I can tell, the Essex Honey title is the UK equivalent of calling an album Jersey Baby. It implies that same sense of youth spent just outside the center of the universe. Hynes has been in the public eye for decades, so we know that the music on Essex Honey doesn’t really mirror the music that Hynes made as a kid, the bugged-out post-hardcore that the teenage Hynes made with his old band Test Icicles. But Essex Honey does sound like a great musician searching for solace, finding it in the music that he loves and the community that he’s built up around himself.
Late in Essex Honey, there’s a song called “Westerberg” where Dev Hynes murmurs softly about regressing into times you know and playing songs you forgot you owned. Hynes sets the scene: “In your ear sings Paul Westerberg.” Then two of Hynes’ collaborators, Eva Tolkin and Liam Benzvi, turn the chorus from the Replacements’ “Alex Chilton” into a soft, reassuring call-and-response: “I’m in love, what’s that song?/ I’m in love with that song.” “Alex Chilton” was Paul Westerberg’s homage to Big Star, and Big Star’s music often referred back to a previous generation’s rock ‘n’ roll. So “Westerberg,” like “Alex Chilton,” sits as a link in a chain, a long lineage of heart-wrecked poetry and heartfelt tribute. Something similar happens on the single “Mind Loaded,” where Lorde comes in to sing a line from Elliott Smith’s “Everything Means Nothing To Me” — another shimmering burst of beautifully sad, sadly beautiful familiarity. The Essex Honey songwriting credits indicate similar interpolations of Yo La Tengo and to the early-’80s New York new wave electro-funk group Warp 9. I can’t find those allusions without help, but I can tell that Dev Hynes knows them inside and out. I can tell that they mean something to him.
The music on Essex Honey doesn’t really sound like the Replacements or Elliott Smith, though sometimes I hear how it could sound a bit like Yo La Tengo or Warp 9. Mostly, it just sounds like Blood Orange. Since Dev Hynes began the project way back in 2009, he has discovered a unique hybrid sound. He piles all these sounds and ideas together — miasmic R&B, utopian funk, echo-drenched indie rock, softly percolating new wave — and he bends them all through his persona prism, making them all sound like the inner contents of one person’s soul even when that one person has a small army of ultra-cool collaborators. On Essex Honey, he refines and perfects that approach, making it more sublime than he ever has before.
Take, for instance, “Somewhere In Between.” Hynes sighs gently about not wanting to be here anymore over splashes of jazzy piano and sweet little shards of violin. The voices of Caroline Polachek and Eva Tolkin swirl around his, consoling and supporting. (Polachek, it’s worth noting, has been a regular on Blood Orange records since she was still in Chairlift.) The mix overflows with details. Someone, presumably Hynes, tootles out a chromatic harmonica solo that sounds like prime Stevie Wonder. A splintery guitar and a deep, popping bass groove lock into sync. Drummer Dillon Treacy’s booming hits drag just slightly, while his cymbal taps add strange little tingles. Hynes comes in with some lonely saxophone. The song moves, but its movement never disrupts its bummed-out fragility. Eventually, the track fades into a lightly discordant cello figure and then into the next song, which happens to be the dizzily beautiful single “The Field.”
Every track on Essex Honey works something like that. The songs aren’t long, but they cast spells. Tons of guests show up to the party, and you can get lost in the trivia of the credits. The actor Amandla Stenberg plays violin on “Mind Loaded,” for instance, while the author Zadie Smith sings backup on “Vivid Light.” Functionally, Essex Honey is a posse record. Voices of Dev Hynes’ friends and collaborators — Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Mustafa, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Wet’s Kelly Zutrau, Daniel Caesar — appear throughout. A lot of the time, I barely notice those voices. They come drenched in so much reverb that they’re barely recognizable, and they’re often just small parts of the vast, overwhelming mix. They’re textures, and they’re beautiful. But it’s just as beautiful when many of these songs pause for just a breath and then house or techno drums come booming in — an instant endorphin-rush trick that Hynes employs again and again. It never gets old, and it never even feels like a trick. Instead, Hynes builds these tracks up until dance breaks feel like inevitable conclusions — like the moments where Hynes has touched enough beauty that he can finally conjure something like joy.
The voices are all characters in the larger tapestry of Essex Honey, and so are the sounds of the instruments — the cellos and flutes and vintage synths and bass-burbles that fill up every piece of the mix without ever letting it feel overcrowded. Essex Honey never sounds like anything other than the particular vision of one person — someone who is both overwhelmingly sad and who is always on a desperate search for things that make him stop feeling sad, if only for a second or two. Hynes’ lyrics are mostly loose and elliptical, though a few sharp details hit home: “Dark weather, New Order, new packet, light smoker.” Here, lyrics are almost beside the point, just like the list of contributors. What matters is Hynes’ near-peerless ability to set a mood. Here, his sound conjures a place where you can always feel welcome, no matter how low you feel. The TikTok kids are going to lose their minds. So am I. So are you, probably. Essex Honey is a quiet opus, an album that demands to be heard in full even if it’ll still work just fine when chopped into short-video shards. It might be the most overwhelmingly gorgeous album we’ll get all year.
Essex Honey is out 8/29 on RCA.
