In a year marked by collective sorrow and political disillusionment, Dev Hynes' fifth album as Blood Orange, 'Essex Honey', has been named the third best album of 2025. The record stands as a deeply personal and artistically profound response to the death of his mother, masterfully embodying the fragmented and unexpected shades of grief.
A Soundtrack for a Year of Loss
The cultural landscape of 2025 has been broadly defined by a sense of grief, reflecting a dismal break with government accountability and protections for marginalised communities. Artists from Anna von Hausswolff to Rosalía, and Bad Bunny to KeiyaA, have channelled this atmosphere into their work. For several, including Jerskin Fendrix, the Tubs, Jennifer Walton, Jim Legxacy, and Blood Orange, this grief was intensely personal, focusing on lost loved ones. Hynes' contribution, however, feels uniquely attuned to the distracted, restless headspace that follows a profound personal loss.
The album's restless nature is established immediately in its painful opening lines on 'Look at You'. Hynes sings, "In your grace, I looked for some meaning / But I found none, and I still search for a truth," setting the tone for a record that contrasts a dying person's acceptance with a living person's struggle to comprehend it.
The Fragmented, Beautiful Journey of Essex Honey
'Essex Honey' is a wide-reaching and sonically diverse search for solace. It refashions the Durutti Column's 'Sing to Me' into a racing hymnal on 'The Field', and delivers bristling, Robert Rental-style post-punk on tracks like 'The Train (Kings Cross)' and 'Countryside'. The album features a plainly soulful duet with author Zadie Smith on 'Vivid Light', while 'Life', featuring Tirzah, basks in languid, flute-dappled funk.
Hynes' arrangements are elegantly naturalistic, often mimicking the flow of thought and memory. Songs shift focus disconcertingly: breakbeats hurtle into silky strings, shrieks of flute vault over collagist piano. 'Thinking Clean' begins with clipped vocals and stilted piano before spinning into gorgeous disco, only to be muted by the sudden intrusion of a grunting cello. This motif repeats across the record, acting as an unexpected jolt back to pain amidst moments of reprieve.
A Lived-In Quilt of Collaboration and Surrender
The album is richly populated by collaborators from Hynes' two-decade career, including Caroline Polachek, Mustafa, Lorde, and Brendan Yates of Turnstile. These guests are deployed not showily, but as patchwork pieces in the record's beautifully lived-in quilt. Polachek's pristine falsetto offers an angelic presence, while on 'Mind Loaded', Lorde's raspy exclamation of "everything means nothing to me" suggests someone unravelling, echoed by Hynes' deep voice like a tempting underworld figure.
Lyrically, Hynes holds on and looks back, regressing to the Essex countryside of his youth and finding solace in sibling relationships. He almost didn't release the record, questioning its point. Ultimately, he saw it as a privilege to share with fans, making 'Essex Honey' feel like a gift as much as a dispossession. The final song, 'I Can Go', concludes with a mirror of the opening: a surrender to the irretrievable, accepting that the lesson in loss is that there is no lesson. This startling, intuitive record captures the feeling of a life rearranged by grief, tracing its awful new contours with devastating beauty.
