Top 50 Albums of 2025: No. 3 – Blood Orange: Essex Honey | culture

TThere’s a lot of sadness in the best albums of the year. Not surprisingly, 2025 will mark a final and somber break with government accountability, protection of marginalized people, and halting the encroachment of artificial intelligence into creative and intellectual fields, to name just a few atrocities. Anna von Haussolf and Rosalia reach transcendence from these worldly disappointments. Bad Bunny and KeiyaA both addressed colonial abuse and neglect with anthems of resistance. On a more personal scale, Lily Allen and Cate Le Bon faced disillusionment with mis-sold romantic ideals. For Jerskin Fendrix, The Taps, Jennifer Walton, Jim Legxasi and Blood Orange, the grief was, quite clearly, grief for lost loved ones.

Each of those albums was as special and profound as any personal experience of loss has always been. Dev Hynes’ fifth album, Blood Orange, felt uniquely connected to the fragmented, fragmented headspace that comes after the death of someone, in his case, his mother. Essex Honey’s troubled nature is summed up in its haunting opening lines, which you can read as Death’s acceptance of death in stark contrast to the ability of the living to confront it on these terms: “In your grace, I searched for some meaning,” Haynes sings of Look at You. “But I found nothing, and I am still searching for the truth.”

This research is extensive. The Field recasts Durutti’s Sing to Me column as a racing hymn made for the Ford Escort stereo. There are little Robert Renthal-style post-punk gems in The Train (Kings Cross) and Countryside that brim with frustration. Vivid Light is an emotional duet with Zadie Smith. Life, marked by Tirzah’s unmistakable vocals, softens with languid funk speckled with flute. Haynes’ focus even shifts within individual songs, often to disorienting effect. Without warning, staccato strokes will rush in and excite silky strings; A flute scream might leap above a drifting piano riff, like a meteor singing a clothesline. Clean thinking begins to sound as if he’s holding on to something, Haynes’ clipped pleas accompanied by a rolling piano; Then she spins into a dazzling disco, letting go of all her tension – only for a snoring cello to lurch and muffle her daydreams. Other harsh cello motifs recur throughout the record, like unexpected jolts back to pain amid moments of sunshine relief.

But when you let Essex Honey envelop you, it flows like weather playing through a window. For all its stark inconsistencies, it’s wonderfully naturalistic, not just because of the omnipresent wisps of sound—a seagull’s cries, a sample from Desmond’s ’90s black British sitcom, his mother discussing the Beatles on the Christmas before she died—but thanks to Haynes’ elegance as an arranger. Each song is cast in a melancholy glow, moved the way the mind moves. “Look at You” begins with stately, long, breath-taking notes; Partway through, Haynes’s breath seems to catch the idea, and specks of sax and percussion float like dust through the lens. His vocal melodies somehow sound accidental and immaculately rendered at the same time.

He doesn’t sing alone very often. The album’s guest list is a testament to the Rolodex built over more than 20 years of Hynes’ music—including Caroline Polaszek, Mustafa, Maby Fratti, Lorde, and Turnstile’s Brendan Yates—but he also doesn’t spread out his guests in a dazzling manner; Like patchwork pieces in the quilt of a beautifully lived-in log, there as support and to draw desperate feelings out. Polachek, who appears the most, brings an angelic presence through her original lie. In Mind Loaded, Lorde’s girlish rasp as she screams “Everything means nothing to me” suggests a person who is coming apart at the edges. Haynes’s deep voice echoes hers, like an underworld figure confirming her worst fears and tempting her to surrender to the darkness: “And it all happens before you get to me.”

Essex Honey goes against this kind of mentality: when the worst happens, why does anything else matter? Haynes’s impressionistic lyrics continue to look back, and hold true: He disappears into the Essex countryside of his youth, finding solace in the unique comfort offered by sibling relationships; “Throw back the times you knew / Play the songs you forgot you had,” he sings on Westerberg. He almost didn’t release the record, wondering what its purpose was. Then he realizes how privileged he is to be able to share his music with fans, and Essex Honey comes as a gift as much as a deprivation. The final song, “I Can Go,” concludes with a mirror image of the first line: “Now, what you know / There’s nothing I can carry / I can go,” Mustafa sings. It’s like you’re resigning yourself to the irretrievable, and accepting that the lesson of loss is that there is no lesson. This stunning and intuitive record captures the feeling of life being rearranged, and beautifully traces its terrible new contours.