By Daniela Trajtman \/\/ <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Devont\u00e9 Hynes has always made music that feels like a memory you can\u2019t quite place. Since Negro Swan<\/em> and Freetown Sound<\/em>, he\u2019s built a world out of quiet introspection, full of songs that mix grief, love, and small glimpses of joy. With Essex Honey<\/em>, his fifth studio album and his first full-length album as Blood Orange in six years, Hynes sounds more at peace with the blur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Los Angeles Times described Hynes as \u201calways digging and reworking<\/a>,\u201d and that\u2019s exactly what this record feels like: an excavation. The Guardian called Essex Honey<\/em> \u201can exquisitely eclectic portrait of grief<\/a>,\u201d while Pitchfork wrote that it \u201cinhabits memories of an English childhood filled with joy, pain, and music<\/a>.\u201d Both are right. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLook at You\u201d opens the album softly, with layered synths and fragile vocals that make you lean in. \u201cThinking Clean\u201d and \u201cSomewhere in Between\u201d deepen that haze. They drift between piano, cello, and electronic texture, blurring the line between form and feeling. \u201cSomewhere in Between\u201d in particular captures the album\u2019s mood of uncertainty, tenderness, and unwillingness to explain itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On \u201cThe Field,\u201d 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\u2019t feel like cameos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMind Loaded\u201d is one of the record\u2019s most haunting songs. Lorde quietly interpolates Elliott Smith\u2019s \u201cEverything Means Nothing to Me,\u201d a moment that lands like a ripple in still water. \u201cVivid Light\u201d brings in Zadie Smith reading about writer\u2019s block, giving the track a restless, almost cerebral tone. \u201cCountryside\u201d takes a step back; the arrangement feels open, calm, and nostalgic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cLife\u201d brings the focus inward again. It\u2019s about time, change, and the blurry line between who you were and who you\u2019re becoming. \u201cWesterberg,\u201d named after The Replacements\u2019 frontman, folds that nostalgia into something more direct. Hynes sings about \u201cregressing back to times you know,\u201d which fits the album\u2019s whole theme: the past never stays gone, it just changes shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time we reach \u201cThe Train (King\u2019s Cross)\u201d and \u201cThe Last of England,\u201d the tone shifts from personal reflection to farewell. \u201cThe Last of England,\u201d perhaps the record\u2019s emotional core, finds Hynes speaking to his late mother: \u201cTime has made it seem we can talk \/ But then they took you away.\u201d It\u2019s one of those rare songs that feels both personal and universal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cScared of It\u201d glows with traces of soul and understated groove, while the closer, \u201cI Can Go,\u201d ends the album quietly, lingering on a note of departure and possibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Essex Honey is smaller and more fragile than Cupid Deluxe<\/em> or Freetown Sound<\/em>, but it carries just as much emotional weight. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n