Blood Orange Mourns Beautifully on 'Essex Honey'

“As exciting as watching trees sprout” is decidedly a pejorative idiom. Still, it’s somehow the perfect way to describe these elegiac bops. Indeed, Devonté Hynes, on his fifth studio LP as Blood Orange , manages to make life’s contemplative moments seem urgent, celestial, and rehabilitative. No actual trees sprout on the elemental “Vivid Light,” a standout track about gazing aimlessly out the window. But Hynes details life’s vicissitudes with poetic exactitude. “But now it’s sad in May/A harder truth to take in (nothing makes it better”),” he coos. Never has a sunny morning seemed so arrestive, so hopelessly illuminative.

The album’s pointed cover, showing a dolorous schoolboy gripping a phone while holding a basketball, hints at the weighty revelations contained therein. The U.K. maver