Blood Orange 'Essex Honey'
29th August 2025

'Essex Honey' is a soundtrack created from a dreamscape of his journey working through grief. It is also an album about growing up in Essex and the way music has inspired, healed, and interwoven itself through Hynes’ life. This list of collaborators on the project includes Lorde, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar, Mustafa, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Tariq Al-Sabir, author Zadie Smith, Ian Isiah, Tirzah, Eva Tolkin, The Durutti Column, Wet’s Kelly Zutrau, actors Naomi Scott, Amandala Stenberg, and Liam Benzvi.

'Mind Loaded' is stunning

'Everything means nothing to me' sounds like an interpolation of Elliott Smith to these ears?

Mind Loaded <3 <3 best thing ever, soty territory

It's so bizarre to me that Dev's only UK Top 40 hits will likely forever be when he was in indie band Test Icicles way back in 2005. Tbf “Circle Square Triangle” still sounds enjoyable to this day, if a little basic now.

Liking the singles so far, although you can't go wrong with a Caroline Polachek/Lorde vox. Mustafa fits well on this track too, I enjoyed a couple of his singles last year - including the beautiful “Gaza is Calling”. Not sure that any of the singles have blown me away but I'm sure it'll make sense as part of the forthcoming album, which I look forward to.

My favourite from Blood Orange remains “Augustine”. <3

Eta- he also charted as Lightspeed Champion in 2008! I think I've got that on CD single somewhere.

Wouldn't be surprised if 'Champagne Coast' eventually gets a boost into the top 40 from somewhere, it's been hanging around in the top 200 on Spotify for most of the year.