Essex Honey by Blood Orange

Essex Honey, the fifth Blood Orange album, landed on 29 August 2025 through a joint Domino and RCA arrangement, Dev Hynes' first record for RCA and his first full-length since Negro Swan in 2018. Hynes is a busy hand behind other people's records, but this one turns the camera on himself: it grew out of a stretch of grief and of looking back on his childhood in Essex, and on the way music pulled him through.

The guest list reads like his address book, with Lorde, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar, Mustafa the Poet, Turnstile's Brendan Yates, Ben Watt of Everything but the Girl, Naomi Scott, Amandla Stenberg, Zadie Smith and even The Durutti Column. Yet nobody hijacks the mood. The record moves like memory, soft-focus and searching, reaching for some kind of acceptance rather than a tidy ending.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.