No surprise here: the new Blood Orange is excellent, a typically stellar showing informed by Dev Hynes’ grief.

Blood Orange has long been one of the most consistently interesting and effective artists of the 2010s and ‘20s. The master of atmosphere turns from humid American metropoles to crisp English memories on Essex Honey. 40-year-old Dev Hynes created six albums that never repeat themselves but are unmistakably his, and has lent his signature tactile wist and inventive production to the likes of Solange, Lorde, FKA Twigs and Mariah Carey. 

His new record Essex Honey feels like a departure from precedent — feels, as in, the rain on your skin. Whereas much of his work (thinking especially of the Godsent Negro Swan) sounds humid, sticky and cosmopolitan, Essex Honey sounds arid, stately, dusty. 

That change reflects the album’s central concern: the death of Hynes’ mother in 2023, and the extensive time he spent back home before and after. Hynes grew up in Ilford, a town outside of London known for making black and white photograph materials, an appropriate background for an artist whose music feels filmic. Blood Orange evokes a place, moment or feeling in the body more than an emotion. That remains true on this record, though, the geography of the conjured place changes. A clear piano rings out, as if traveling through a roomy English estate. Semiscratchy strings remind you that a cello is made of dry wood. Whereas echo in Negro Swan buffets against the tight, muggy interior of the car pictured on the album cover, on Essex Honey it seems to traverse across a capacious room, encountering no resistance from carpeted seats or thick, balmy air. 

But as always, the music also locates itself deep inside the listener. It travels, fills out the caverns inside your body like warmth traveling down your throat after a shot. But rather than a warmth, Blood Orange music is a thick, understanding fog. The words aren’t necessarily the point, the pang of understanding deep in the stomach — or, in this case, the striking hollowness in the chest that grief leaves — is. 

Which is not to say the music is overly familiar or knowable: Hynes, the producer behind some of Solange and Lorde’s best work, is a brilliant experimenter. Two thirds of the way through almost every song on Essex Honey, he promptly switches up, throwing each element of the song on hard ground and piecing the track back together sharper, harder, brighter, more urgent. Before the original form of a song could possibly get old, Hynes blows it up into something undeniable. 

Speaking of his illustrious collaborators, the backup he brings in here is spot-on: Lorde, for one, Mustafa, Caroline Polachek frequently, Daniel Caesar. Caesar in particular highlights the singularity of Blood Orange: Caesar’s (excellent) discography has a similar twilight placement to it, but Caesar seems to sit in one place and croon, whereas Hynes roams, twists, travels. Whereas Caesar speaks from the heart, Hynes teleports the heart to a landscape of his making; or possibly disappears the listener entirely, vaporizing them into an ache in the air.

A possible apex of an album that only goes up is “Mind Loaded,” featuring Polachek, Lorde and Mustafa. Find an Elliot Smith interpolation, fingerpicking at heartstrings, Lorde and Polachek singing together as if in a chorus. And naturally, ⅔ of the way through, the sound crashes, Hynes and Lorde sing together and Caroline does her thing on top. It gives goosebumps, and feels precisely like being alone in the cavernous, charged sanctum of a church. In the outro, after the heaven and hell that’s been visited, grating piano and the refrain “getting closer to your loss” make the body feel like a vibrating string about to snap. On first listen, I wanted to throw my coffee at the window. It is awe-striking. Lacanian philosophy sees too-intense, total, overwhelming sensation as close to death — in this song, Hynes seems to whip up a flurry of this jouissance; reaching, flapping, raggedly crying out towards the other side.