There’s a lot of grief across the best albums of this year. It’s unsurprising: 2025 has felt like a definitive and dismal break with government accountability, protections for marginalised people and holding back the encroachment of AI in creative and intellectual fields, to cherrypick just a few horrors. Anna von Hausswolff and Rosalía reached for transcendence from these earthly disappointments. Bad Bunny and KeiyaA countered colonial abuse and neglect with writhing resistance anthems. On a more personal scale, Lily Allen and Cate Le Bon grappled with disillusionment about mis-sold romantic ideals. For Jerskin Fendrix, the Tubs, Jennifer Walton, Jim Legxacy and Blood Orange, grief was, straightforwardly, grief for lost loved ones.
Each of those albums was as distinctive and profound as any personal experience of loss always is. Dev Hynes’ fifth album as Blood Orange felt uniquely keyed into the fragmented, distracted headspace that comes after someone passes, in his case, his mother. Essex Honey’s restive nature was summed up in its painful opening lines, which you could read as the dying’s acceptance of death starkly contrasting the living’s ability to meet them on those terms: “In your grace, I looked for some meaning,” Hynes sings on Look at You. “But I found none, and I still search for a truth.”
Blood Orange: The Field ft the Durutti Column, Tariq Al-Sabir, Caroline Polachek and Daniel Caesar – video
That search is wide-reaching. The Field refashions the Durutti Column’s Sing to Me as a racing hymnal made for the stereo of a Ford Escort. There are tough little Robert Rental-style post-punk gems in The Train (Kings Cross) and Countryside that bristle with frustration. Vivid Light is a plainly soulful duet with Zadie Smith; Life, featuring Tirzah’s unmistakable vocals, basks in languid, flute-dappled funk. Hynes’ focus even shifts within individual songs, often to discomfiting effect. Without warning, a breakbeat will hurtle in and whip up silky strings; a shriek of flute may vault over drifting, collagist piano noodling, like a meteor singeing the washing line. Thinking Clean starts sounding as though it’s holding on to something, Hynes’ clipped entreaties accompanied by stilted piano; then it spins off into gorgeous disco, relinquishing all its tension – only for grunting cello to stagger in and mute the reverie. Other severe cello motifs repeat across the record, like unexpected jolts back to pain amid sunlit moments of reprieve.
But when you let Essex Honey envelop you, it flows like the weather playing through a window. For all its stark contrasts, it’s gorgeously naturalistic, not just for the grounding wisps of found sound throughout – seagull cries, a sample of the 90s Black British sitcom Desmond’s, his mum discussing the Beatles the Christmas before she died – but thanks to Hynes’ elegance as an arranger. Every song is cast in a wistful glow, and moves the way the mind does. Look at You starts with plush, elongated synth notes that evoke breathing; part way through, Hynes’ own breath seems to take over the motif, and motes of sax and percussion float by like dust across a lens. His own vocal melodies somehow sound incidental and immaculately turned at the same time.
He doesn’t often sing alone. The album’s guest list is testament to a Rolodex built up over Hynes’ 20-plus years in music – including Caroline Polachek, Mustafa, Mabe Fratti, Lorde, Brendan Yates of Turnstile – but nor does he deploy his guests showily; more like patchwork pieces in the beautifully lived-in quilt of the record, there as support and to externalise hopeless emotions. Polachek, who pops up the most, offers an angelic presence with her pristine falsetto. On Mind Loaded, Lorde’s girlish rasp as she exclaims “everything means nothing to me” suggests someone coming apart at the edges. Hynes’ deep voice echoes hers, like an underworld figure affirming her worst fears and tempting her to succumb to darkness: “And it all falls before you reach me.”
Essex Honey brushes up against that sort of mindset: when the worst has happened, why does anything else matter? Hynes’ impressionistic lyrics keep looking back, holding on: he disappears to the countryside of his Essex youth, finds solace in the unique comfort of sibling relationships; “regressing back to times you know / Playing songs you forgot you owned” as he sings on Westerberg. He almost didn’t release the record, wondering what the point of it was. Then he realised how privileged he was to be able to share his music with fans, and Essex Honey comes off as much a gift as a dispossession. The final song, I Can Go, concludes with a mirror image of the first line: “Now, what you know / Is nothing I can hold / I can go,” Mustafa sings. It feels like surrendering to the irretrievable, accepting that the lesson in loss is that there is no lesson. This startling and intuitive record captures the feeling of a life rearranged, and traces its awful new contours beautifully.
