Blood Orange, Between the Strings

After releasing his first Blood Orange album, Coastal Grooves, in 2011, Devonté Hynes co-wrote and co-produced what is, by my approximation, the best pop song released in my lifetime: Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing.” After doting on a marriage of Brit-pop and emo-folk under the banner of Lightspeed Champion, his work on that one Ferreira track, along with his command on a slinky and evocative collision of dapped-up R&B, out-of-time New Wave, and cosmic electro-pop, put him in rooms with Solange, Lorde, Britney Spears, and Kylie Minogue—artists with “insane pop knowledge,” as he calls them. “It’s fun, because I don’t think that way—and I know I don’t think that way. And I’m okay with not thinking that way. I know what I can do, and I know what I can’t do, and I’m very sure in both of those arenas. It allows for me to have a lot of fun and have my mind blown. There’s a story and a lesson learned, every single time.”

But what feels even more improbable is that the hand Hynes has lent to pop’s current mecca is one of the least fascinating things about him. Sure, his recent CV includes playing guitar on “Favourite Daughter,” the best part of Lorde’s great new album Virgin, singing on Erika de Casier’s brilliant track “Twice,” and supplying drums to Vampire Weekend’s “Prep-School Gangsters.” But in another lifetime he was a teenaged guitarist in the post-hardcore band Test Icicles. Then he became a quiet mouthpiece for social justice, using photographs of trans women as album covers (in a way that reminds me, loosely, of what the Smiths did with their cover imagery 40 years ago) and putting trans women in his songs, pilling interludes with clips of spoken-word and Black film, and evoking the concrete poetry of Saul Williams and the melodic diversity of Mingus Ah Um.

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In the last half-decade alone, as his side-quests have grown even more radical, he’s scored films like Queen & Slim and We Are Who We Are, collaborated with Philip Glass, and curated the music for Francesco Risso’s Marni fashion shows. And, after accepting an invitation from Hanif Abdurraqib, Hynes brought three classical works—Inheritance, the piano concerto Happenings (which he originally wrote for a sextet but later expanded for the BAM ensemble), and Fields—to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Opera House stage in 2022 and drafted Adam Tendler, the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and Third Coast Percussion to perform them.

“When I am posing in that way, there is a freedom that I think I wasn’t necessarily always allowing myself when I was making Blood Orange music,” he admits. “In my head, I found a world that was ‘Blood Orange’ and would write more to my physical performance ability. In orchestration, it’s all your wildest ideas. You write them on the page, you fill out the notation, you add funny little symbols to it, and then it exists. Someone plays it. That process, to this day, is still mind-blowing to me. I can’t ever get over that that’s how that works. And I think that freedom definitely found its way into how I create Blood Orange music.”

But what seems to be the most impossible, I’d reckon, is that Dev Hynes is also batting 1.000 on his own studio albums, assembling what might be the most underrated run of solo material by any artist this century: Coastal Grooves, Cupid Deluxe, Freetown Sound, Negro Swan, and now, Essex Honey. The music—prismatic, fragile, and feminine pop strata—began in elegance, acting as sonar for like-minded eccentrics (Dirty Projectors, Caroline Polachek), living legends (Blondie’s Debbie Harry), and card-carrying members of this century’s pop pantheon (Carly Rae Jepsen, Nelly Furtado). And, thanks to a TikTok-motivated popularity boost, “Champagne Coast” recently went platinum.

WE CAN GLEAN FROM Hynes’ previous press revelations that growing up in London was not a particularly endearing experience. For every story he’s regaled about learning how to skateboard or playing football, there’s a tragedy of him—at an age not much older than the boy on the cover of Essex Honey, captured by Johny Pitts—getting spit on by schoolmates on the bus. As he put it in 2018, he was “a queer kid thinking of suicide.” Joy is subtle on Essex Honey but sorrow is abundant, as is nearness and leaving. Hynes, who is nearly 40, reaches towards gentleness in a way he didn’t on “Orlando” seven years ago, when he sang, “first kiss was the floor, but God it won’t make a difference if you don’t get up.”

“You try and find understanding, at least I did in my twenties and early thirties,” he says. “There was an energy—a confrontation—that I was working from and working with. And I think, now, it’s less about the fight and confrontation. It’s about going further back, deeper inside. The roots. Even when I was younger, I thought I was going into the roots. Now I realize that it runs deeper.” But there’s another side to it. Hynes says that, while Blood Orange wasn’t a pre-planned career, the older records captured him getting “a lot of things out of my system” in the moment. “It’s interesting now, when I look through [my work] and I can see a story within the albums,” he elaborates. “Stories end, so I think, ‘Well, what else is there to say?’ There’s always going to be something. I see the shape.”

When Hynes’ mother fell ill in late 2023, he cancelled a show with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and went home to the grassy knolls and flat coast of Essex—to the “specificity” of his being born, growing up, and mortality. As the cold weather augmented his grief, and as hearing Sufjan Stevens’ “Fourth of July” on laptop speakers became a sobering sanctuary, he tended to her until she passed away in February, only to return to New York City and resume working on Essex Honey. He sang, “Nothing more to do but leave, following the corners of the room,” and “Another morning here without you.” He wrote, “Everything you knew has gone away,” and held pictures of the place he came from vividly within himself, processing the loss of a parent just as he had processed a loss of self on “By Ourselves” and “Smoke.” “Even if I didn’t need to be physically there to record, the idea of the literal place and, you could argue, the idea of the place, or the dream state of the place, were all very, very clear.”

Hynes once said, too, that “everyone should be aware of where things come from.” On Essex Honey, he’s applying that idea to himself and stripping metaphor from the chassis. The album is about growing up in England but written from the viewpoint of living in New York as an adult, where Hynes has resided since 2007. “If I was [in Essex], I don’t know if I could fully [make Essex Honey],” he says. “It’s the classic, ‘leave to write about the place’ thing.” There is a recording of Hynes’ sister and mother talking about the Beatles during their last Christmas together on “The Last of England,” but the street sounds you hear on “The Train” were recorded in New York. And that was intentional, meant to mimic a “memory with all the corners of it,” Hynes says. “It’s dreamlike, it’s hazy—it’s joy, sadness, grief, happiness. And the love of music and memories that are real, memories that are false. I’m trying to always capture those complexities.”

While in residence with BAM, Hynes used the Academy’s studio to dance and write piano improvisations. You can hear that in his arrangement of Caecilie Trier’s cello on “Thinking Clean” and “The Field,” or in the breakbeat-assisted piano contrasts cresting through “The Last of England,” or in “Mind Loaded,” which features actor Amandla Stenberg on violin. With those classical motifs feathered into schmaltzy electronica and drum ‘n’ bass, Essex Honey is effusive, vintage, and patchy, with beat switches, fade-aways, and a vocal syndicate not unlike the sensual coherence of Freetown Sound’s slinky, ‘80s-glorifying package. Periods of Essex Honey’s writing and recording, Hynes says, “shared an energy” with that record, because there’s a physicality present—you can “feel the hand and process,” so to speak, on a song like “Countryside.” On “Somewhere in Between,” I am reminded, above all, of the anachronistic, plinking synths in Arthur Russell’s “That’s Us/Wild Combination.” Like Weezer, his affinity for Malcolm McLaren’s “Madam Butterfly” is ever-present in his intentions, but Essex Honey’s best (subconscious) callback is to one of Hynes’ East England neighbors, Yazoo. Specifically, “Only You” emerges every time the synths in “Mind Loaded” wash over me.

But on a song like “Scared Of It,” Hynes lets some of the best guitar phrases of his career beautifully unfurl. Since leaving Test Icicles more than 15 years ago, his use of the instrument shows up methodically on Blood Orange projects, most handsomely in the guitar vamps of “Orlando” and most incongruously in the funk chords of “Nappy Wonder.” I ask if it’s a conscious decision then—an effort, perhaps, to not oversaturate the guitar’s presence—to make each appearance all the more precious. “I actually love playing bass more than I love playing guitar,” Hynes reveals, which is especially true in the context of “I Listened (Every Night),” “but I used to have this thing where I would work based on what was around me. I’d travel with my hard drive, and I would go into studios and, if there was no guitar in the studio, then there’d end up being no guitar.” In the early phases of Essex Honey, he was simply playing more guitar than usual. After wanting to try bringing those motivations into the record, the guitar and the cello clicked into the songs’ themes of musical discovery, because they were the first instruments he ever played. “They were the most important instruments to me when I was younger.”

SITTING BEFORE ME, shaded by full bookshelves, Hynes recounts his relationship to sampling—what he considers a “case of growth from the sampled piece of music and its connection to me, rather than a case of making and then searching for something.” The Blood Orange catalogue is fluent in plundering. Since 2011, Hynes has lined his work with the pursuits of Dorothy Ashby (“You’re Not Good Enough”), Charles Mingus (“By Ourselves”), the B-52’s (“I’m Sorry We Lied”), James Brown (“Clipped On”), and himself (“Time Will Tell”). His appearance on the Avalanches’ “We Will Always Love You” in 2020 is an oft-forgotten but heroic effort on an otherwise disappointing record. “There could be a musician you work with where, maybe, they want to read the sheet music,” he says. “Or, maybe, their strength is you give them chords and they find their own thing inside it. Or, maybe, the best thing is they just create something from scratch. I feel the same way about sampling. There’s a million different ways you can manipulate and create something from it.”

Trying to build a song out of the Durutti Column’s “Sing to Me” was initially unsuccessful. “I realized my failure was that I was trying to go inside it and meet it,” Hynes says. “But actually, the reality is that the song exists and it’s so strong that I had to use it as a base and then be on top of it and create something above it while keeping that core so solid.” With “Sing to Me” as a bedrock and the voices of Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek, and Daniel Caesar cross-sectioned with his, Hynes wove a lush melody of string tangents, vocal shifts, and piano injections into a choppy, lo-fi rhythm on “The Field,” revealing something that would have sat nicely on a C86 cassette 40 years ago. “I think every piece of music is so different, it needs to be treated differently. For me to do that, it has to be such a deep connection. And I have to respect it. It’s like a person, like a musician—you find what the strength is for what you’re doing.”

Later, in the soul-bearing, impressionistic “Westerberg,” Hynes repurposes the “I’m in love, what’s that song? Well, I’m in love with that song” couplet from the Replacements’ “Alex Chilton,” tapping Tolkin and Benzvi to transform the chorus into a call-and-response. On “Mind Loaded,” one of Essex Honey’s oldest songs, Lorde, Mustafa, and Kelly Zutrau sing “everything means nothing to me” like it’s theirs, not Elliott Smith’s. “We were thinking about Elliott and then Kelly sang that line in that moment, and it was so perfect. Her vocal is in there, it’s a bit tucked in,” Hynes beams and then reveals that, at one point, there was a version of “Mind Loaded” that expanded the Smith reference even further, but it never made sense.

When he and Lorde were working on Virgin, she replaced his vocal in the final mix. And, when Mustafa—whom Hynes claims he’s had “a million Elliott Smith conversations” with—found out that a lot of Essex Honey’s material featured lines pulled from other peoples’ songs, he suggested creating an extended melody from “Everything Means Nothing to Me.” So, just as Paul Westerberg sang about his heroes Big Star in 1987, Hynes uses Essex Honey’s interpolations to show gratitude to the music that he’s held dear his whole life. He elaborates, “Every song is about me and something I’ve lived and something that’s in my head. But, within that, it’s a vast, wide range—the people you meet and the people that inspire you and the people that stay with you and the people that leave that also stay with you afterwards.”

SINCE 2023, five Blood Orange albums have come and gone, but nobody has heard them, because Hynes makes music quicker than he puts music out. And he is always thinking in those terms, chucking every piece of material he comes up with onto too-long playlists and then, with a heavy, attentive hand, editing them again, and again, and again. “I’ve never had issues finishing things. I’m lucky in that sense, that I really know when something is done and I can let go of it,” he gestures. “But if there’s a downside to it, it means I really know when something isn’t finished, so I will know there’s a longer process on the way to get to the place where I can feel comfortable.”

It’s been seven years since Negro Swan and its world-weary, immersive salves cemented Hynes as an iconoclast, but the career of Blood Orange has never been dormant. And, given where we are now, where instant-gratification is king and fewer artists are interested in becoming anthropologists in their work, Hynes’ role as a curator is paramount. “The process of working on these albums scratches an itch of instant-gratification,” he suggests. “But, also, it’s an exercise in patience. And both of those things are happening in tandem with each other. The main reason I play every instrument is because I want it to exist. I want the idea to happen right now.” The foil to that, he says, is logistics. If he wants Caroline Polachek’s ideas on a song, for instance, then they both have to figure out when they’ll be in the same city again. “Depending on how you look at things, it’s a blessing or a curse.” After hearing Polachek’s efforts on “The Train (King’s Cross),” I’m inclined to believe it’s the former.

Essex Honey’s feature list reads like a group chat. Polachek and Lorde are here, as are Mustafa, Daniel Caesar, Eva Tolkin, Liam Benzvi, Charlotte Dos Santos, Tirzah, and Mabe Fratti. Their voices are all covered in reverb. TURNSTILE singer Brendan Yates is on “Scared Of It,” reciprocating what vocals Hynes lent to him and his band four years ago on “ALIEN LOVE CALL.” I ask Hynes if working with Yates keeps the hardcore flame burning within him—if a post-Test Icicles niche in his heart gets filled by their friendship. “It’s nice to have that energy back,” he says. “It’s proof of something that I think about a lot, which is the idea of the ‘individual creative’ and how every single person is a human filter and will never make something that someone else will make. No matter what you consume, it will come out individually.”

With Yates, it was learning, after years of closeness, that they are both Beach House obsessives. “And he’s from Baltimore, so he really is in it,” Hynes chuckles. But he had never clocked that before, and then he and Yates were on the phone for two hours talking about it. “This is how his process comes out when it goes through him, and mine is mine. I think he’s a genius, and I think people don’t even realize how much of a genius he is.” He breaks out into a holler. “‘LIGHT DESIGN’?? Oh, my fucking God.” I mention hearing “SEEIN’ STARS” in the background of a recent Taco Bell ad. Laughing, Hynes says he still owes Yates a text about that.

And, as a successor to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ appearance on “Love Ya,” London author Zadie Smith is present and singing on “Vivid Light.” I think of her 2023 book The Fraud and the Tichborne case that excited it, which Smith began thinking about 10 years prior, when she was working on NW. “Does a small curiosity taking years to become a fully-realized thing sit within you or keep you humble about seeing the life of your own work through?” I ask Hynes. He pauses for a moment, moving the microphone part of his wired headphones closer to his mouth. “Talking to people from different practices is just eternally interesting to me,” he says. “I have no real ‘time cap’ on my music. There’s music on [Essex Honey] that I wrote 12 years ago, and some music from eight years ago. I’ve never felt this sense of now with the creative process.” He mentions studying literature and classical music at the Chadwell Heath Academy in Redbridge, where “age and time was never really looked at” with a sense of urgency. “If anything, the stuff made when one creator was younger was under-looked, because you’re like, ‘Oh, they haven’t really worked out where they’re going yet.’”

Though the template of making an album on a laptop in a bedroom can be contagious, Hynes still likes to hangout—surrounding himself with friends, working until he starts “smacking up against a ceiling,” and then asking for a second opinion. “You will be amazed at what you decide to press play on when someone’s in the room.” It’s not a brainstorm, he clarifies, but a “baton being handed over,” saying that “nearly everyone that ever sings on an album is because I tend to want their thought-process.” On Coastal Grooves and Cupid Deluxe, he’d write and then want a voice to sing it. That’s how Nedelle Torrisi and Friends’ singer Samantha Urbani got involved on those records (Urbani’s presence on Cupid Deluxe was recently given proper credit, after a decade of being left out of the album’s story). The turning point in his relationship to collaboration, Hynes remembers, was Freetown Sound—the tropical “Best To You,” specifically, which he initially shelved because he “didn’t know what to do with it.” But he eventually played it for Empress Of’s Lorely Rodriguez, and she quickly came up with an idea for the vocals. Now, it’s one of his most popular songs, and it’s the reason why Essex Honey is a collectivist’s triumph, anchored by beautiful voices outside of Hynes’ beautiful own.

After Negro Swan came out, Hynes told Craig Jenkins that his dream was to “just make something and people will hear it.” I ask him about nourishment and self-fulfillment—where he needed to go and what he needed to let go of to locate the textural dream of Essex Honey. “I had to get over myself, first and foremost, because I really was questioning why it needed to exist,” he admits. “My ‘fan brain’ and my ‘creator brain’ have always lived very separate lives and I had to somewhat introduce them to each other—because, living in the fan brain, you want people that have an opportunity to release things into the world to release things into the world. You live with these items, whether it’s on the train, or not feeling so good at home, or even if [you think] it’s just something dumb to occupy the time. These things are the greatest joys for me. These are the things that make life worth living.”

Of course, there are also the fortunes of knowing how to make music, to still have reason to make music, and to have avenues to put that music out. In that sense, Dev Hynes is a very rich man. And then there comes the lucky part, knowing that people even want to hear your music. “When I started thinking of it like that, that I can put something out and someone, somewhere, is willing to listen to it, I was like, ‘Oh, I gotta get over myself. This is so dumb,’” he surrenders. “It’s such a privilege I have, to be able to put music out into the world.” In an interview with Zadie Smith two years ago, Hynes recounted a similar experience, about him no longer feeling embarrassed to make music. So, I wonder aloud if Essex Honey is his post-shame album. “No,” he responds, his directness curling into a demure laugh. “I definitely still feel embarrassed. It turns out, I still feel shame. But I think that’s a good thing.”

Essex Honey is out August 29 via RCA/Domino.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

COVER STORY | Blood Orange, Between the Strings

Dev Hynes spoke with Paste about classical music giving freedom to Blood Orange, using samples to communicate with loved ones and old obsessions, curating voices outside of his own, and the grief that informed his new album, Essex Honey.