“Sometimes I feel like I’ve been misunderstood my whole life,” Dev Hynes says, his voice soft but certain. “And then you hear a record that makes you feel like… someone saw you before you even saw yourself.”
That search for recognition threads through Essex Honey, his first Blood Orange album in six years, seeing his creative impulse drawn back to Essex, where he was born and raised. The title had lingered with him for six years before the music arrived. The cover for lead single ‘The Field’ features John Constable’s Golding Constable’s Flower Garden, a painting that captures the tenderness of home and the stillness of a familiar landscape. For Dev, the painting isn’t just a nod to art history, it’s a bridge to his own beginnings, a way to hold the fleeting sweetness of home within the album. Textured with intimacy and absence, the record carries the weight of the past while insisting on the present. And yet, for all its reflective depth, it’s also about connection: collaborators including Lorde, Caroline Polachek, Brendan Yates from Turnstile, Mustafa, Daniel Caesar, and Tirzah expand its emotional palette, embodying the tenderness and precision Hynes has long centred in his music.
Hynes’ Baker’s Dozen maps another layer of those connections, artists he reveres as “the greatest,” records that comforted him when he was adrift, sounds that inspired him to play with the same care he’d heard in someone else’s hands. Sometimes it’s a lyric that stays with him, sometimes, as with an album title he wishes he’d thought of first, it’s the spark of an idea that lingers. What emerges is not a dry list of influences, but a portrait of a restless listener forever curious, absorbing, translating what he hears into something uniquely his own. And as Essex Honey reminds us on tracks like ‘Mind Loaded’and ‘Somewhere In Between’, it’s in the space between past and present, grief and hope, memory and imagination, that the nectar is found. These 13 albums are companions to Essex Honey, whispering, challenging, reminding him who he’s been and who he’s still becoming.
Blood Orange’s new album Essex Honey is released on 29 August via RCA
To begin reading Dev Hynes’ Baker’s Dozen, click ‘First Selection’ below
