This is ‘This Is Not Happening’ and it’s time for ‘Album of the Month’. The album is Essex Honey by Blood Orange and the Month is Oct. 2025. Some months we have obvious choices for AOTM, some months we have few options and some months it’s impossible to choose an album as there is an embarrassment of riches to pick from. This month we struggled with the latter but settled on Essex Honey. I am VERY glad we did but others are less so!
Devonté Hynes, AKA Blood Orange, is a Grammy-nominated English singer, songwriter, record producer, composer, and director based in New York City. I forgot all about the fact that he was in Test Icicles and was previously known as Lightspeed Champion before transitioning into Blood Orange. Devonté is a talented human being, playing multiple instruments to a standard where he plays for other artists; I think he is a consummate songwriter and an incredible producer. He also directs film work, composes scores and soundtracks… the list probably goes on.
But let’s focus on Blood Orange. This is the 5th album from Blood Orange released over an extended period since 2011. The albums that I am most familiar with are Cupid Deluxe from 2013 and Negro Swan from 2018. Both of these were consdidered for AOTM’s back in the TINH blog days. I think my decision to not pick them was that they would be considered to ‘noodley R&B’ by some on the blog? And I think this will be the deciding factor in the reaction to Essex Honey … but it’s also 14 years later, music has changed, the world has changed and we’ve all changed too.
So what does this album ‘sound like’? By this I mean, can we easily describe its sound, genre and similarity to other music so we can help build a picture of this for people?
The quick answer to this is … no. But I will have a go. I think the first thing people will hear is ‘R&B’ but I think that is massively reductive and will actually put some people off who might really enjoy this. I think this is fundamentally a pop album, it is a pop album about grief, loss, time and home … so it’s not disco-bangers-pop. This is key. The abum was written after the loss of his mother and the exploration of this in his mind. How it made him think about time, home and loss. It’s contemplative, calm, reflective, artful and soulful, experimental-pop. It’s an album of melodic fragments collected and presented across 14 songs and nearly 47 minutes. Yes, it uses some of the melodic and stylistic tropes of R&B … but no more than it uses the structure and approaches of classical music.
Here are some hot-takes on what I can hear on this album (interestingly, only one of these is an ‘R&B’ artists);
- Big Sufjan energy – ‘Carrie and Lowell’ (another album about loss which Dev listened to a lot after he lost his mother) but also ‘The Ascension’ and ‘Javelin’.
- There are also big jazz vibes that occur in the transitions and the odd fragment that reminds of Andre 3000 in experimental but also The Love Below modes.
- There are tracks that almost feel pure dream-pop guitar band a la early Deerhunter.
- I’d add Andorra-mode Caribou in this thought too.
- The tell-tale melodic style of Tuung pop up every now and then.
- The use of guitar (and how and where it is important) reminds of Blonde by Frank Ocean
The album is predominantly instrumented by guitar, piano, synths and a wealth of woodwind, brass and strings. Guitars are very important to this album. But for me the most important instrument is the human voice, Dev’s and his fellow contributors. There are so many vocal sounds and energies that wash over you at moments and pull you in at others.
Pretty much ever ‘track’ has a transition into the next ‘track’. These transitions are often fragments of other melodies, abstract sound experiments with acoustic instruments or a bit of everything. These transitions will be make or break or break for some in my opinion. Do these transitions create an angular energy in an otherwise very calm, lower-energy album or do they represent an interruption in the flow of energy from one amazing pop melody to the next.
As with any album, there are layers to the listening experience with this album. It is beautiful music to accompany you through life – working, cooking etc. But there is way more to this than it being beautiful background music. The next layer down is to listen in headphones on a calm walk, I found this to be a hypnotic and pseudo-therapeutic experience, thank you Dev. Sitting down and listening with lyrics reveals another layer and is massively rewarding.
This is what YouTuber ‘Deli’ did in his live reaction video – he predominately talks about hip hop so I was interested to watch this which is loads of fun and really interesting watch.
There are moments of pure lyrical beauty that are always accompanied by pure melodic beauty. With some artists, it feels like they think of a clever lyric and shoe horn it into the melody or the other way round – on this album it feels like this cmbinned beauty just flows out of Mr. Orange. A perfect example of this is on ‘Somewhere in Between’ where the lyric ‘Light was just for hope and it keeps flickering, and I just want to see again’ is paired perfectly with the songs melodic hook.
For me, there is a classical, symphonic approach to the strucure of this album. It feels like an overture, with repeated phrases, themes and motifs appearing throughout. These motifs reference themselves across and throughout the album. This coupled with Devonte’s skill as a writer of melody, lyrics, his experimental approach to instrumentation and accompaniment makes this at the very least, a very clever, fascinating album created by a very clever, fascinating artist.
If you like it or not might be a different matter. I love it.
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