Devonté Hynes is telling me how he came to be living back in his childhood home in Ilford, east London, at the age of 37, after his mother had fallen ill. “It was a surreal experience,” he says of the sudden move from Brooklyn, where he makes music as Blood Orange, to sleeping in the bedroom where he once put up posters of David Beckham and the Smashing Pumpkins. “Physically, you’re bigger: your shape has changed. But the space is the same. The memories are the same.”
Hynes came back to England to be by the bedside of his mother in hospital, and stayed at home a while after she died in 2023. This tragic disruption produced his fifth full-length release, Essex Honey, a clear contender for album of the year. It’s a record grounded by grief but fizzing with the memory flashes that came with returning home to the edge of Essex; the record that sounds most like the place he left almost two decades ago.
