Blood Orange

Ilford, Chadwell Heath, and two discarded names

Devonté Hynes was born on 23 December 1985 in Ilford, east London, to a Guyanese mother and a Sierra Leonean Creole father, and grew up in the Essex commuter belt just beyond it, going to school at Chadwell Heath Foundation School. The geography matters more to his work now than it did for the first fifteen years of it, which were largely spent getting away from it.

His first public outing was Test Icicles, the dance-punk trio he played guitar and synth in between 2004 and 2006. It broke up almost as soon as it had an audience. In 2007 he moved to New York and remade himself as Lightspeed Champion, releasing two albums of guitar songs under that name before dropping it around 2010.

Blood Orange started in 2009 and became the only name he has kept. It is also the one that allowed everything else — the producing, the scoring, the writing for other people — to sit alongside the records rather than compete with them.

Four albums, and a parallel career doing other people's records

Coastal Grooves came out in 2011, Cupid Deluxe in 2013, Freetown Sound in 2016 and Negro Swan in 2018. The arc across them runs from thin, trebly solo guitar pop towards a dense, guest-heavy, conversational kind of record-making in which other voices do a lot of the talking and Hynes assembles rather than performs.

That instinct has made him one of the more in-demand collaborators of the past decade. He has written and produced for Solange, Britney Spears, Carly Rae Jepsen, FKA twigs, A$AP Rocky and Mac Miller, among a long list of others. He has scored films including Palo Alto, Queen & Slim and Passing, written chamber and orchestral work, collaborated with Philip Glass, and composed music for the 2024 Broadway production of Job.

Between Negro Swan and the next album there was only the Four Songs EP, released in 2022. Seven years passed without a Blood Orange full-length, which is a long time for an artist who had put out four in as many album cycles.

Essex Honey

The reason for the gap turned out to be the subject of the record that closed it. The pandemic arrived, then his mother became ill, and Hynes spent long stretches back in Essex with her until her death in 2023. Essex Honey is shaped by that throughout — not only the bereavement itself but the memory of the place the bereavement sent him back to.

Speaking to NPR around the release, he described the record as dealing with the realities of trauma, death, grief and depression, and said the shock for people when something very bad happens is realising that the world is still moving. He also described writing the lyrics as literally as possible on the theory that precision travels further than abstraction. One detail he singled out, the small knitted hearts a hospital hands out when someone dies, turns up in the song The Last of England.

Three singles led it out: The Field on 26 June 2025, the double A-side Somewhere in Between and Mind Loaded on 17 July, and Countryside on 27 August. The album followed on 29 August 2025 on Domino and RCA, with contributions from Lorde, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar, Mustafa, Brendan Yates of Turnstile, Ben Watt, Tirzah, Naomi Scott, Amandla Stenberg, The Durutti Column and the novelist Zadie Smith. Hynes has said he values the conversation with collaborators more than the credit, and that the best contributions push a song past what he had planned for it.

The reception was the strongest of his career: a Metacritic average of 88 from the published reviews, with Pitchfork at 8.1 and five-star notices in the British press. Commercially it stayed modest in the way his records always have, reaching number 19 in Scotland, number 33 in New Zealand and number 41 on the Billboard Top Album Sales chart. The writing nods repeatedly towards Elliott Smith and The Replacements, and one line lifts Smith's "everything means nothing to me" more or less intact.

Where things stand in October 2026

The Essex Honey tour has turned into the longest sustained road run Blood Orange has done. Announced in July 2025 with tickets going on general sale on 11 July, it began as a September-to-November 2025 stretch across North America, the UK and Europe — three nights at Alexandra Palace Theatre, two at Brooklyn Steel — folded in opening slots on tours by Lorde and Turnstile, both of whose recent albums Hynes worked on, and then kept extending. Setlist.fm has logged roughly seventy performances under the tour's name.

A second leg opened in North America on 3 March 2026 at The Anthem in Washington DC. Through the summer he worked the European festival circuit, playing Primavera Sound in Barcelona on 4 June and Bonnaroo in Tennessee on 12 June, then headlined the Rally festival in Southwark Park, south London, on 29 August 2026 — a year to the day after the album came out. September brought three nights at The Warfield in San Francisco and a Shaky Knees slot in Atlanta on 18 September. The most recent confirmed performance was Austin City Limits at Zilker Park on 4 October 2026, a fifteen-song festival set.

What remains of the 2026 diary is festival work rather than headline shows: Austin City Limits' second weekend, FORM Arcosanti in Arizona and III Points in Miami in mid-October. The November 2025 Manchester date was billed at the time as the last European headline show for the foreseeable, so the UK and Europe are not currently on the board beyond festival bookings.

Hynes has been blunt about the business he is operating in. At 39 he told NPR the modern release cycle has become awful, buried under algorithmic noise and the constant fight for attention — which reads less like complaint than explanation for why he spent seven years not releasing an album and then spent two years playing the one he did.

What the reviews of the tour have said

The notices from the 2025–26 run agree on one thing: the record works better in a room than on headphones. The Mancunion, covering the O2 Victoria Warehouse show in Manchester in November 2025, wrote that Essex Honey has to be experienced live, and that in performance it takes on a different light altogether. The reviewer's other observation was about range — Hynes moving between keyboards, guitar and cello, and sliding between new material and fifteen-year-old songs without flagging the joins.

Student station WMUC's write-up of the Washington opener on 3 March 2026 described a short, unshowy monologue to the crowd and an atmosphere it called communal, with cool-toned lighting built to match the album. The Luna Collective's review of the Austin show at ACL Live at the Moody Theater that same month made a similar point from the opposite direction, arguing that Hynes shrank a large theatre into something closer to a private room, and that the back-to-back run of Family and Saint read as a collective release rather than a performance of grief.

The older songs are doing heavy lifting too. Champagne Coast, from 2011, has consistently drawn the biggest response of the night; Bad Girls was revived in Washington for what the reviewer reckoned was its first outing since 2017.