Blood Orange Announces First New Album In Six Years: Essex Honey
SET FOR RELEASE ON RCA RECORDS AUGUST 29TH 2025
LISTEN TO NEW SONGS ‘MIND LOADED’ FT CAROLINE POLACHEK,LORDE AND MUSTAFA
AND ‘SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN’ NOW
Blood Orange - aka Dev Hynes - will release his first album in six years - entitled Essex Honey - on August 29th, 2025 via RCA Records. Written, produced, and recorded by Hynes, 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 (outside London) and the way music has inspired, healed, and interwoven itself through Hynes’ life.
Like all Blood Orange albums, Essex Honey comes with an incredible list of collaborators, some who have created with Hynes multiple times, and others who are new to his sonic fold. These include Lorde, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Cesar, Mustafa, Turnstile’s Brendan Yates, Tariq Al-Sabir, author Zadie Smith - singing on an album for the first time - Ian Isiah, Tirzah, Eva Tolkin, The Durutti Column, Wet’s Kelly Zutrau, actors Naomi Scott and Amandala Stenberg, and Liam Benzvi. A full track listing is below.
Today, two brilliant songs from the album are available to hear – “Mind Loaded” and “Somewhere In Between.”
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO “MIND LOADED”
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO “SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN”
CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER ESSEX HONEY
There are very few artists that have contributed to music in the way that Dev Hynes has done to date. The Grammy winning, multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter, producer, composer, has paved a path unlike any other artist since he started out over two decades ago, beginning with his nascent punk roots in Test Icicles in the early 2000’s to having a song - “Champagne Coast” - go gold in 2024 courtesy of TikTok. Indeed, it’s tough to imagine any other artist who has been nominated for a Grammy in a Classical category while winning a Latin Grammy - “Best Alternative Song” with Nathy Peluso - while ALSO releasing albums in neither genre: Blood Orange is firmly rooted in future nostalgic, leftfield pop/R&B.
Hynes’ influence continues to reverberate throughout culture. Since 2012, he has been an in-demand producer for everyone from Mariah Carey and ASAP Rocky to Carly Rae Jepsen and Lorde. In 2022, Hynes opened 15 shows at Madison Square Garden for the one and only Harry Styles, in addition to music directing Styles’ Grammy performance of “Watermelon Sugar” (in which he also played bass). He has spent the last three years selling out shows internationally performing his own classical compositions in London, Sydney, Toronto, and more, while also scoring things like Luca Guadagnino’s HBO show We Are Who We Are, Rebecca Hall’s Passing, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener and shows for acclaimed fashion house Marni twice a season.
Essex Honey is everything Hynes does best and then some. Lyrically, he taps into the experiences of himself and his close friends, creating a love letter to his musical inspirations, including himself, wrapped in honesty. Close listens reveal refrains from some of Hynes’ influences growing up, including Elliott Smith, The Replacements, and more, allowing Hynes to lean backwards to his comfort listens while moving his own sound forward. Essex Honey is an album tinted with grief and loss, working towards acceptance and resolution, at a time when the culture is collectively feeling grief and loss, collectively trying to work towards resolution and acceptance. It is a beautiful swirl, an elegantly-crafted pastiche of melodies and sounds, assembled in the way only Hynes knows how, crafting an intimate, scintillating whole and one of the best albums of 2025.
Blood Orange UK Tour Dates
Fri Nov 7 - London, UK - Alexandra Palace Theatre
Sat Nov 8 - London, UK - Alexandra Palace Theatre
Sun Nov 9 - London, UK - Alexandra Palace Theatre
Mon Nov 10 - London, UK - Alexandra Palace Theatre
Thu Nov 13 - Bristol, UK - Electric Bristol
Sat Nov 15 – Manchester – AO Arena w/ Lorde
Dev Hynes
