Essex Honey

Essex Honey is both a love letter to growing up in the English countryside and a reminder that acceptance is necessary in order to heal.

“Essex Honey” isn’t something you’d put on to rock a party, but it’s perfect for the last hour of one, when people are winding down, or just a night at home with dim lighting — a chill masterpiece that isn’t for every mood but is perfect for many.

Essex Honey is essentially a series of sketches, put out into the world before they could be framed. Yet therein lies its beauty, stemming from the bravery of Dev Hynes in sharing such bare thoughts and sadness with the world.

A remarkable album with more gateways than a knowing mixtape, Essex Honey shows that Hynes is as ingenious as a would-be DJ, A&R, and talent connector as he is as a songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and singer.

Although his voice doesn’t quiver with emotion and texture like those of serpentwithfeet, Sampha, and FKA twigs, it makes plaintive lines land as dreamy.

On Essex Honey, Blood Orange has found a purpose for his music to express the most devastating of emotions. Musically, everything is precisely where it should be—every saxophone note, every programmed beat, every ringing piano chord. Nothing here is throwaway because it fulfills a need deep within his creative soul.

‘Essex Honey’ isn’t about convention or the norm; as Dev continues to push against these boundaries, surrounded by acclaimed like-minded contemporaries, he delivers something far from easy but certainly entrancing.

Few albums are this emotionally refined, giving us a real sense of grief — when life comes at you fast — while somehow distilling the “it is what it is” mundanity of seeing water drip down the drain. At the end of the day, Blood Orange catches more flies with Essex Honey.

Essex Honey, with its cool, crisp textures and elliptical rhythms, is expansive and beguiling, an inviting place to rest in a chaotic year.

Over time, I found the album to be stickier than its first impression. The pensiveness of its approach is, after all, an effective rendering of the sense of crippling stillness which awaits in grief; periods of deep paralysis stirred only by sudden anguish or unexpected joy. Essex Honey isn’t about England, it’s about the mourning Hynes experienced there.

With ‘Essex Honey’, Hynes doesn’t offer immediate catharsis or easy answers. Instead, he provides something equally valuable: an honest documentation of processing grief with such sophistication that his individual journey becomes widely resonant. It’s Blood Orange at his most complex, vulnerable, and accomplished.

It’s this delicate placing of guest vocals, personal anecdotes and on-the-street soundbites that make ‘Essex Honey’ the most organised sketchbook, one which perfectly encapsulates this particular moment in time.

Essex Honey might also seem like this: uncomplicated, modest. But that’s just the work of a great, precise artist.