Blood Orange, 'Essex Honey' Album Review

Discernible, Musical Loss Circles Blood Orange on Essex Honey

Writers have talked ad nauseam about using art as a way to both transcend and understand their own reality. To quote White Noise author Don Delillo: “Writers will write mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.” Musicians certainly use this process of emotional excavation too, but for Dev Hynes, AKA Blood Orange, the focus of his art has never been the literal. Like other avant-garde legends such as Arthur Russell and Alice Coltrane, what Hynes does best is create an atmosphere. Operating at this macro-level is no doubt a polymathic side-effect, but it’s also the mark of a great producer—and the proof is in the pudding, as for the past ten years Hynes has gone on to work with everyone from Solange and Sky Ferreira to Mariah Carey and Kylie Minogue. It makes sense that his own work as Blood Orange would maintain the same constructive ethos.

Whether he’s blending 80s new wave with R&B guitar licks (Cupid Deluxe, Coastal Grooves), or fusing spoken word with jazz piano, found traffic sounds, and deep-cut gospel samples (Freetown Sound, Negro Swan), Hynes’ left-field pop combinations form an anthropological collage that is less narrative than it is an outline of a “feeling.” The feeling Essex Honey commands is grief, specifically the death of Hynes’ mother in 2023. But because of his instinct for abstraction, Hynes is able to translate this nebulous emotion without veering into didacticism or appearing overwrought. In his hands, grief becomes amorphous, resisting cliche and expectations—much like the artist himself.

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I’d still wager many will claim that Essex Honey is Hynes’ most “explicitly personal” album—and while that may be thematically true, literally intimate it is not. The written context is practically nonexistent, save for the geographical touchstones found in the album name and the title of the track “The Train (King’s Cross).” “Last of England” is the closest the album comes to personal vulnerability, with its mention of his hometown (“Ilford is the place that I hold dear”) and inclusion of a snipped audio recording of Hynes and his mother talking on their last Christmas together.

In fact, at first listen, Essex Honey might seem underwhelming. While still eclectic and grand, the flashiness and swagger of previous Blood Orange albums is muted by gentler, vast compositions. Instead of the usual programmed drum beat, slow piano is the bedrock of many of the tracks’ formations, albeit shrouded or highly reverberated, like in the mystical opening track “Look At You.” The closest Hynes ever really gets to a true “dance” track is at the midway point of “Thinking Clean,” when it crescendos into a drum break with saxophone fanfare over the refrain “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“I Listen” has a similar glimpse of energy, transforming a smug bass lick, acoustic guitar, and syncopated drum pats into a Coastal Grooves-era disco club beat, with Lorde singing harmony on the lines “falling out the way, nothing makes you stay” aside a twinkling cello. Like “Thinking Clean,” a cello coda, played by either Hynes or Cæcilie Trier, closes out over half of the tracks. If you think about it, the stages of grief are like the movements of a symphony—each phase with its own mood and rhythm. But unlike the standard orchestra’s rise and fall, grief’s arrangement is fickle and nonlinear. Really, it’s all contingent on the ability—and willingness—of the conductor to move with its turbulence.

The phases in Essex Honey cycle mostly through denial and depression, most frequently when Hynes is physically back home, reflecting somberly on his bucolic childhood in Ilford—the very place he received classical cello training. On the ballad “Countryside” a synthesized snare taps along as Hynes asks to be “Take[n] back,” imagining that if he returned home, perhaps “[you’d] still [be] alive.” “Somewhere In Between” then suddenly dips back into the darkened mood of the opening track “Look At You.” The shrouded piano and its hook return, now with a distant, Stevie Wonder-esque harmonica, and a watery guitar. Caroline Polacheck then comes in with the original refrain of “hard to look at you” while Hynes adds a contrasting one: “I just want to see again.”

Because of Hynes’ concentration on architecture over interior design, the album creates this sort of strange central vacancy; a discernible, musical loss. Many of the sounds feel almost too distant, particularly the vocal ad-libs from the featured artists. The blips of aphorisms and wordless riffs wisp by like a memory you can’t quite place, or on the happier end of the spectrum, a lesson learned as a child coming back to light. So while it’s certainly thematically appropriate, the featured guest list is so impressive you can’t help but wish their roles were slightly more important. I mean, it isn’t every day author Zadie Smith appears on an album—but without seeing her credited on “Vivid Light,” you probably wouldn’t have known.

Still, the overlapping voices blend effortlessly with the spacey arrangements and hazy transitions. They create a surrealness that is not fully nostalgic, but “somewhere in between” both past and present, grief and recovery. The ghostly “Mind Loaded,” featuring violin from actor Amandla Stenberg, relays this idea as Hynes is older, wiser—“mind loaded,”—yet still bereft. Polacheck asks to break out of this cycle—“help me on my way”—when suddenly a sluggish beat drops and brings forth Lorde and Mustafa, both chiming in with an Elliott Smith lyric: “Everything means nothing to me.” For this brief moment, the song feels oddly liberating. But before getting too comfortable, it’s almost immediately overrun by a brooding piano.

Like “Mind Loaded,” rare peaks of acceptance blink through the gray, whisked in by quick dance builds and the more direct musical references. “The Field” grounds itself in an acoustic sample of the Durutti Column’s tune “Sing to Me,” but builds upon it through bytes of crashing waves, a steady jungle beat, and doleful melismas from both Caroline and Daniel Caesar. It’s a calm reprieve within the greater emotional schlep of the album’s melodies, one that only seems accessible because of the outside musical accompaniment. Healing, it seems, is aided when he steps out of his own solitary world and into the sounds of his childhood.

On “Westerberg,” Hynes pays tribute to the Replacements and inches even closer to resolution. He says he’s “seen the truth” but at the same time is still “regressing back” by listening to the songs of his youth. Eva Tolkin sings the refrain, “I’m in love / What’s the sound?” from “Alex Chilton,” and, just as the speaker is reaching some emotional shift, a distorted cello snakes in with the “I don’t want to be here anymore” hook from “Thinking Clean.” Like a symphonic mobius strip, on Essex Honey, grief is always returning back into itself. In just one instant, all restoration gets completely undone.

Even on the gorgeous finale “I Can Go,” healing is still a long way away: there’s no dramatic breakthrough, only Hynes finally granting himself just the permission to try to escape this endless cycle. Sounding like an outtake from Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, cello sings with spiritual synth while hesitant keys unite to cleanse the speaker of his guilt. “I can go,” he sings with Mustafa, “nights that flow, patience in you.” Here, finally, is the upward spiral, and it sounds so simple, so easy. Essex Honey might also seem like this: uncomplicated, modest. But that’s just the work of a great, precise artist. To quote the brilliant Clarice Lispector: “Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort.”

Read our cover story on Blood Orange here.

Discernible, Musical Loss Circles Blood Orange on Essex Honey

Dev Hynes translates nebulous abstraction without veering into didacticism or appearing overwrought. In his hands, grief becomes amorphous, resisting cliche and expectations—much like the artist himself.