Blood Orange’s new album ‘Essex Honey’ asks ‘Why should it exist?’

It’s a Friday in New York City, where Devonte Hynes, otherwise known as Blood Orange, is tucked away in his apartment. The afternoon sun has just begun to peer through his windows, revealing stacks of books with a black cello case gently leaning against them.

Hynes sits center frame via Zoom, with a black bandanna loosely wrapped around his hair. A set of headphones covers his ears; its wires fall alongside his dreads. He’s talking about his forthcoming fifth studio album, “Essex Honey,” releasing on Friday.

The album first sprang to mind six years ago, when the title began as a simple game of phonetics. But it wasn’t long before Hynes, who hails from Ilford, England — sitting between London and coastal Essex — found himself reminiscing about his youth and what home meant to him.

“It wasn’t like a plan, it just kind of happened,” he remembers. “It’s not so much the physical but more the mental. I think it’s more that I started thinking about growing up and my time there, and maybe … trying to understand how formative it was.”

Thus, the tracks for the album so closely tied to his formative Essex years were laid down nearly 3,500 miles away. Even with an ocean between him and his home, he says that he can “have a place in my head and then it doesn’t really matter where I do it.”

“The place in my head was England, but I could go anywhere and get that done, in a way,” he adds. “It’s almost like I build what the surroundings are, and then once I have that, whenever I work on the record, it feels like I’m entering the place.”

Consequently, “Essex Honey” shows a soft deviation in tone from his previous work. Perhaps, a return to more of the smooth and somber tones that painted “Negro Swan” rather than some of the livelier tracks on “Angel’s Pulse.”

“I make music the same way, all the time,” Hynes says. “But in terms of living and my life, they’re made in very, very different headspaces.”

For this one, he felt a shift in his creative process: “It’s made from a place of living life, and the outcome is the music, rather than living the music and the outcome is life.”

“Essex Honey” feels freer, though it’s still been meticulously constructed. Regarding its production, Hynes concedes that “I’m always digging and I’m listening and I’m reworking.”

It’s a testament to the on-the-go style that Hynes thrives on. In fact, it’s where his music blossoms and why there’s such a deep variation in instrumentation across his projects. When it comes to choosing those instruments, it’s whatever is in his proximity.

He pans the camera to another corner of his apartment, where an acoustic and electric guitar are racked up next to a mixing console. A cello hides behind them, along with a saxophone.

Hynes confesses, “I’m the worst saxophone player you’ll ever meet,” but he knows how to make it sound “listenable.”

“I can mix and manipulate audio and make it sound how I want it to sound,” he says. “I’ve always felt that’s my strength.”

He even goes as far as traveling with a hard drive at all times, so he can pop into studios and apartments and build upon the parts of songs he’s already laid out. On one occasion, he remembers being in Paris and recording and “mashing” two drum lines together for “Somewhere in Between” with another pianist, Dylan.

“I was recording that song by myself and pressing record, and then having to run into the drum booth, try to do the track, then f— up, and then having to run back out,” he says. “It was a lot of that energy for that song, but I really enjoyed it.”

It all sounds chaotic, and it very well may be — “Essex Honey,” following suit, lived on a hard drive for most of its life, and he didn’t back it up until it was “very late … like, too late.”

“No one’s trying to steal Blood Orange albums out of an Uber,” he says while laughing, referring to ever misplacing the drive.

But it all comes together in the end, and every noise sounds as if it’s in its right place — no drum too abrupt, no sax that withers away to die a slow death out of arrangement.

When it comes down to the features on his records, it’s mostly a matter of whoever he is around at the time.

“It’s as simple as that, they’re in the room.”

In some instances, he would tap artists he’d previously worked with, like Ian Isiah and Caroline Polachek. With them, he says he’ll be working on a song, like “The Field,” which opens with seagulls singing into a brisk air, rolling waves and then a soft guitar.

“I’m like, ‘I know Caroline could take this somewhere,’” he says.

Lorde was a particularly interesting case; the 28-year-old appears on “Mind Loaded,” popping up for an instant during the track to softly sing, “Everything means nothing to me,” a call back to singer-songwriter Elliott Smith.

He’s since joined up with the New Zealander for her “Ultrasound World Tour” and is set to open for her at her Oct. 18 show at Kia Forum, just two days after his solo show at the Shrine Expo Hall.

“The actual initial idea was Kelly [Zutrau] from Wet,” he recalls. “I was working on a version of that song, and Kelly had the idea of singing ‘Everything means nothing to me.’

“So, that existed in the song over the next six years … and then Lorde sang on top of it.”

This production style has worked out for him so far, and he’s got four successful studio albums to back it. But even so, he’s still subject to the surprises that social media can spring upon any artist.

In 2024, thanks to TikTok, his song “Champagne Coast” blew up — a mere 13 years after its release. The track comes from his debut, “Coastal Grooves,” released in 2011.

“It’s interesting to me, in the sense of how much of an anomaly that type of success is,” he says. “I think it shows how much people shouldn’t strive for it, because you can’t. … It’s funny [how] people are constantly chasing virality, because even the word itself tells you how random it is.”

“You don’t try to catch viruses; they come to you,” he jokes.

Hynes’ “Essex Honey” comes six years after his acclaimed album “Angel’s Pulse” was released in 2019.

(Vinca Petersen)

There are a lot of aspects of social media and the internet that he is still trying to wrap his head around, even as an artist who has existed in that space for so long. Aside from virality, he also thinks features like “listener counts” feel out of place.

“If you want to listen to a song, you see how many people have listened to it next to the song, which is so crazy,” he says, laughing, possibly in horror. “I think people don’t talk about how crazy that is!”

“We’ve accepted it; that is so psychotic … Can you imagine buying a book, and on the book is how many people have read it?”

Hynes is clearly someone who cares about the art he bestows upon the world, and he says “some people might think that [“Champagne Coast’s”] success equals the success of Blood Orange, but that’s not true.”

But “Essex Honey” nearly never came to be because of the sincere love affair he has with his music and, specifically, the concept of “meaning.”

“Trying to work out why it should be released was actually quite an obstacle,” he says with a furrowed brow, but still bearing a smile. “I could make it and I could finish it — finishing things I can do.”

He struggled to answer questions like “Why should it exist” and “Why should it go into the world,” as it felt his music always had to have a place, per se.

“Me not knowing what the use is … I didn’t think there was a good enough reason not to put it out,” he continues. “I got to a place where I got over myself, because actually thinking that way is quite self-centered, and I think a little bit non-appreciative too.”

He pauses.

“Wait … If you wait one second, I just read a quote …”

Hynes places his headphones down and drifts over to his bookcase, before coming back into frame 30 seconds later. He’s holding a copy of John Berger’s “Permanent Red.”

“He says something so good,” Hynes continues, turning over the pages. “It’s actually from Van Gogh, but he says, ‘The cart one draws must be useful to people whom one does not know.’”

To him, his music must have a purpose. It always painted the background of his days, whether it’s as simple as him being on the train, or more intimately as a “crutch” or “connection.” But his philosophical endeavors met a simple end when he was faced with the one who knew better than any other: himself.

“The fact that I know how to make music, am in a position to release music … and people want to hear it, it’s like, ‘F— make music!’”