After grief brought Dev Hynes home, he reconsidered the county that shaped him. The result is a masterful new album – made with a little help from Lorde and Zadie Smith
D
evonté Hynes is telling me how he came to be living back in his childhood home in Ilford, east London, at the age of 37, after his mother had fallen ill. “It was a surreal experience,” he says of the sudden move from Brooklyn, where he makes music as Blood Orange, to sleeping in the bedroom where he once put up posters of David Beckham and the Smashing Pumpkins. “Physically, you’re bigger: your shape has changed. But the space is the same. The memories are the same.”
Hynes came back to England to be by the bedside of his mother in hospital, and stayed at home a while after she died in 2023. This tragic disruptionproduced his fifth full-length release, Essex Honey, a clear contender for album of the year. It’s a record grounded by grief but fizzing with the memory flashes that came with returning home to the edge of Essex; the record that sounds most like the place he left almost two decades ago.
Haynes started out in the 2010s making dance-punk with Test Icicles and indie-pop as Lightspeed Champion, and then settled into poignant, groove-led R&B as Blood Orange, and was sought as a songwriter by Solange, Mariah Carey, Carly Rae Jepsen and more. Fields, a classical collaboration with Third Coast Percussion, was Grammy-nominated in 2021. But Essex Honey exists at a slight remove to everything that came before it: it is full of wide, ambient vistas that segue from mournful to sublime like an estuary sky, as the lyrics contemplate death, youth and the restorative effects of the English countryside.
