Blood Orange ‘Essex Honey’ Review: Hiding in Plain Sight

Blood Orange’s 2013 breakthrough, Cupid Deluxe, was so indelible in part for how it swung between moments of funky elation and utter malaise, often during the course of a single song. Dev Hynes’s last album under the moniker, 2018’s Negro Swan, was more consistently dour, and the alt-R&B pioneer’s follow-up, Essex Honey, burrows even deeper into melancholy.

While Hynes lyrically explores loss, memory, and loneliness, he still finds ways to elegantly break through the fog with moments of joy, ecstasy, and comfort. These moments of relief arrive in brief flashes throughout Essex Honey—often via musical flourishes, from the rattling percussion that grounds the otherwise free-floating “Mind Loaded” to the noodling guitar, shakers, and handclaps that bring momentary buoyancy to “I Listened (Every Night).”

This is Hynes’s most piano-centered album to date, his solemn playing routinely complemented—or, in some cases, waylaid—by frenetic guitar, synths, or saxophone. The initially piano-driven “The Last of England,” for one, eventually gives way to a disorienting clash of breakbeats and strings that’s among the more startling sonic contrasts in a discography full of them. This is Hynes’s preferred approach: to constantly disrupt and interrupt and never stick with one groove for too long.

Midway through Essex Honey, though, “The Last of England” kicks off a series of what begins to feel like diminishing returns. At its most elusive, Hynes’s work can be too insular, like an intricately constructed world that we’re not quite able to gain full access to. He’s seemingly aware of this, with lyrics about rural fields standing in for the places he wants to retreat to when he’s beset by creative block, as he is on “Vivid Light.” On “Countryside,” he pleads to be taken to the titular location, where he “seek[s] comfort in the leaves.”

All of this hiding and self-protection seems to be a grief response. “I just want to see you again,” Hynes sings on “Somewhere in Between.” The subject’s absence is meaningfully and poignantly expressed, but both musically and thematically, the album’s second half retreats into itself to such a degree that it sacrifices the more readily accessible intimacy and vulnerability of the earlier songs, which stack up to the artist’s best. At its worst, as on “Westerburg” and “The Train (King’s Cross),” the music is both distant and maudlin, with Hynes’s murmured vocals sounding far away and the lyrical rumination verging on self-pity.

Hynes has left the ’80s influences, especially the drum programming, mostly in the rearview here. The album’s opening tracks, “Look at You” and “Thinking Clean,” are marked by crisp live percussion. The latter eventually morphs into a jazzy jam session, which feels looser than anything Hynes has released since Blood Orange’s debut, 2011’s Coastal Grooves.

As a project, Blood Orange has always had a collectivist spirit, and Essex Honey brings back some past guests, including Caroline Polachek and Ian Isiah, while introducing some new ones, like Mustafa, Lorde, and Daniel Caesar. The way Hynes layers their voices alongside his makes the identity of “Blood Orange” and the experiences the songs describe feel less fixed. When Hynes cedes the floor to Mustafa’s gorgeous baritone in the album’s final moments, it’s less like hiding and more like shared communication.