After a six-year wait, Devonté Hynes returns with Essex Honey (dropped August 29, 2025), Blood Orange’s most personal album yet. It’s an immersive map of grief, memory, and identity — rooted in both place (Essex, England) and loss (the recent passing of his mother).
From the first notes of “Look at You,” Essex Honey sets a tone: nostalgic but uneasy — synth washes drift in like smokey air, electric guitar and piano tug between past and present. Hynes lets the mood linger: he doesn’t rush resolution, but sits in the spaces where grief echoes. “Thinking Clean” juxtaposes soft piano, tentative strings, and beats that feel both comforting and disquieting.
Guest features are many (Lorde, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar, Brendan Yates, Zadie Smith, among others), but they never feel inserted for star power. They are voices in a chorus, contributing to the texture rather than overshadowing the core narrative.
One of the album’s strengths is how it weaves musical references — nods to Elliott Smith or the jangly melancholy of indie rock, pastoral folk inflections, ambient washes — into something that remains unmistakably Hynes. His vocal style remains delicate, sometimes breathy, but here it carries more weight; when he sings about Essex, about loss, there’s both longing and clarity.
What lingers: “The Last of England” — a track that balances pride and ache, recalling the streets and landscapes of home with both fondness and critique. “Westerberg” is another highlight, with lyrics like “Regressing back to times you know / Playing songs you forgot you owned …” that show Hynes pulling threads from his childhood and remixing them with his adult self.
If his previous albums felt more outward — reflections on identity, culture, Blackness, queer life — Essex Honey turns inward. It’s the kind of album that demands repeated listens: more to unspool the emotional layers than to admire the architecture (though the architecture — production, arrangement, collaboration — is gorgeous too).
Verdict: Essex Honey is Blood Orange at his most lucidly haunted. It doesn’t seek comfort so much as conversation: with self, with grief, with home. A triumph in emotional honesty and sonic detail — Hynes nails a record that’s both vulnerable and vivid.