By Daniela Trajtman //
Devonté Hynes has always made music that feels like a memory you can’t quite place. Since Negro Swan and Freetown Sound, he’s built a world out of quiet introspection, full of songs that mix grief, love, and small glimpses of joy. With Essex Honey, his fifth studio album and his first full-length album (album?) as Blood Orange in six years, Hynes sounds more at peace with the blur.
The Los Angeles Times described Hynes as “always digging and reworking,” and that’s exactly what this record feels like: an excavation. The Guardian called Essex Honey “an exquisitely eclectic portrait of grief,” while Pitchfork wrote that it “inhabits memories of an English childhood filled with joy, pain, and music.” Both are right.
“Look at You” opens the album softly, with layered synths and fragile vocals that make you lean in. “Thinking Clean” and “Somewhere in Between” deepen that haze. They drift between piano, cello, and electronic texture, blurring the line between form and feeling. “Somewhere in Between” in particular captures the album’s mood of uncertainty, tenderness, and unwillingness to explain itself.
On “The Field,” Hynes brings in Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar, and Tariq Al-Sabir, but instead of spotlighting them, he lets their voices dissolve into his. The song feels communal. That approach defines the whole record. Even when Hynes collaborates with big names, the features don’t feel like cameos.
“Mind Loaded” is one of the record’s most haunting songs. Lorde quietly interpolates Elliott Smith’s “Everything Means Nothing to Me,” a moment that lands like a ripple in still water. “Vivid Light” brings in Zadie Smith reading about writer’s block, giving the track a restless, almost cerebral tone. “Countryside” takes a step back; the arrangement feels open, calm, and nostalgic. “Top Hits” is lighter, a quick detour that toys with pop form before fading away.
“Life” brings the focus inward again. It’s about time, change, and the blurry line between who you were and who you’re becoming. “Westerberg,” named after The Replacements’ frontman, folds that nostalgia into something more direct. Hynes sings about “regressing back to times you know,” which fits the album’s whole theme: the past never stays gone, it just changes shape.
By the time we reach “The Train (King’s Cross)” and “The Last of England,” the tone shifts from personal reflection to farewell. “The Last of England,” perhaps the record’s emotional core, finds Hynes speaking to his late mother: “Time has made it seem we can talk / But then they took you away.” It’s one of those rare songs that feels both personal and universal.
“Glass River” glows with traces of soul and understated groove, while the closer, “Goodbye, Honey,” ends the album quietly.
Essex Honey is smaller and more fragile than Cupid Deluxe or Freetown Sound, but it carries just as much emotional weight. It’s less about external commentary and more about interior life: how you keep going when the sharpness of grief starts to fade but never disappears. The production is immaculate but unpolished, as if Hynes deliberately left some edges rough so the emotion could breathe.
Not every transition lands perfectly. Some songs drift too far into sketches. But even those moments feel honest. Paste Magazine called it “uncomplicated, modest … the work of a precise artist,” and that simplicity is what makes the record so affecting. Essex Honey is introspective, warm, and full of small truths. That’s what makes this album linger.
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