Essex Honey Blood Orange

• 1 Look At You 03:01
• 2 Thinking Clean 03:34
• 3 Somewhere in Between 03:23
• 4 The Field 03:19
• 5 Mind Loaded 03:37
• 6 Vivid Light 04:22
• 7 Countryside 03:01
• 8 The Last of England 03:53
• 9 Life 03:01
• 10 Westerberg 03:26
• 11 The Train (King's Cross) 02:48
• 12 Scared of It 02:41
• 13 I Listened (Every Night) 03:35
• 14 I Can Go 03:01
• Total Runtime 46:42

Info for Essex Honey

Blood Orange – aka Dev Hynes releases his first album in six years – entitled "Essex Honey". Written, produced, and recorded by Hynes, Essex Honey is a soundtrack created from a dreamscape of his journey working through grief. It is also an album about growing up in Essex (outside London) and the way music has inspired, healed, and interwoven itself through Hynes’ life.

Like all Blood Orange albums, Essex Honey comes with an incredible list of collaborators, some who have created with Hynes multiple times, and others who are new to his sonic fold. These include Lorde, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Cesar, Mustafa, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Tariq Al-Sabir, author Zadie Smith – singing on an album for the first time – Ian Isiah, Tirzah, Eva Tolkin, The Durutti Column, Wet’s Kelly Zutrau, actors Naomi Scott and Amandala Stenberg, and Liam Benzvi.

There are very few artists that have contributed to music in the way that Dev Hynes has done to date. The Grammy-winning, multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, producer, and composer has paved a path unlike any other artist since he started out over two decades ago, beginning with his nascent punk roots in Test Icicles in the early 2000’s to having a song – “Champagne Coast” – go gold in 2024 courtesy of TikTok. Indeed, it’s tough to imagine any other artist who has been nominated for a Grammy in a Classical category while winning a Latin Grammy – “Best Alternative Song” with Nathy Peluso – while ALSO releasing albums in neither genre: Blood Orange is firmly rooted in future nostalgic, leftfield pop/R&B.

Hynes’ influence continues to reverberate throughout culture. Since 2012, he has been an in-demand producer for everyone from Mariah Carey and ASAP Rocky to Carly Rae Jepsen and Lorde. In 2022, Hynes opened 15 shows at Madison Square Garden for the one and only Harry Styles, in addition to music directing Styles’ Grammy performance of “Watermelon Sugar” (in which he also played bass). He has spent the last three years selling out shows internationally performing his own classical compositions in London, Sydney, Toronto, and more, while also scoring things like Luca Guadagnino’s HBO show We Are Who We Are, Rebecca Hall’s Passing, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener and shows for acclaimed fashion house Marni twice a season.

Essex Honey is everything Hynes does best and then some. Lyrically, he taps into the experiences of himself and his close friends, creating a love letter to his musical inspirations, wrapped in honesty. Close listens reveal refrains from some of Hynes’ influences growing up, including Elliott Smith, The Replacements, and more, allowing Hynes to lean backwards to his comfort listens while moving his own sound forward. Essex Honey is an album tinted with grief and loss, working towards acceptance and resolution, at a time when the culture is collectively feeling grief and loss, collectively trying to work towards resolution and acceptance. It is a beautiful swirl, an elegantly crafted pastiche of melodies and sounds, assembled in the way only Hynes knows, crafting an intimate, scintillating whole and one of the best albums of 2025.

Blood Orange

Please Note: We offer this album in its native sampling rate of 48 kHz, 24-bit. The provided 96 kHz version was up-sampled and offers no audible value!

Devonté Hynes aka Blood Orange
Raised in England, Devonté Hynes started in the punk band Test Icicles before releasing two orchestral acoustic pop records as Lightspeed Champion. Since 2011, Hynes has released four solo albums under the name Blood Orange – Coastal Grooves, Cupid Deluxe, Freetown Sound, and Negro Swan, as well as 2019’s Angel’s Pulse mixtape, all of which have been critically acclaimed. His songs and albums have explored the complexities and ambiguities of 21st century identity, delving into memory, trauma, depression and anxiety, as well as the triumphs of vulnerable communities, including people of color and queer and trans communities, and where they intersect.

In addition to his solo work, Hynes has collaborated with pop music superstars including Mariah Carey, A$AP Rocky, Solange, P. Diddy, and many others. He is also an accomplished film and television composer, with credits including the scores for Melina Matsoukas’ Queen and Slim, Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are, Rebecca Hall’s Passing, and Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener.

In 2018, Hynes was one of four pianists invited to play alongside Phillip Glass at the Kennedy Center, and in 2020, he was nominated for a Grammy in the category of Best Chamber Music or Small Ensemble Performance for his work with Third Coast Percussion on their album Fields. His debut Concerto for piano and strings, Happenings, premiered at New York’s Little Island Festival in 2021, and most recently in 2022 he has collaborated with the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as the LA Philharmonic, for sold out performances of his Selected Classical Works program.

“The polymath musician is a whole new model of artist, daubing his signature sensibility over music, film, dance and everything else he touches.” - New York Times

“Beyond the pure allure of the sound, Hynes has something profound to say.” - GQ

This album contains no booklet.