Blood Orange, Negro Swan review: A kind of spiritual headquarters, somewhere the disheartened can take cover

Dev Hynes has acquired the laidback air of a cat who once chased his tail but now finds he can capture it simply by curling into a ball

(Nick Harwood)

Some artists characterise songwriting as a cascade of misfires and epiphanies, the bottling of creative fireworks. Dev Hynes, on the contrary, writes songs like bankers write cheques.

Since 2012’s “Everything Is Embarrassing”, the breakout single he co-wrote for Sky Ferriera, the London-born tunesmith has become synonymous with featherlight R&B anchored in blue funk, perfecting the style in low-key collaborations with illustrious singers.

Like Solange’s A Seat at the Table, Hynes’s Blood Orange project feeds politics and spoken-word exposition into his hitmaking formula, producing some of the decade’s most personal and distinctive alternative pop.

Light years from his origins with art-punk terrors Test Icicles, he’s acquired the laidback air of a cat who once chased his tail but now finds he can capture it simply by curling into a ball.

For Negro Swan, Blood Orange’s fourth album, the multiinstrumentalist has dreamed up a 16-song suite that weaves together impressionist psych-pop and interstellar funk, late-Seventies Marvin Gaye and early-Eighties Prince, with some tangled ballads and insomniac blues reminiscent of Elliott Smith and King Krule thrown into the pot.

Hynes calls it an inquiry into “black depression, an honest look at the corners of black existence, and the ongoing anxieties of queer people and people of colour” such as himself, a thesis less solemn than it might sound.

On “Take Your Time”, he uses the expanse of psychedelia to establish a vast, despondent headspace; by the finale though, a puckish woodwind solo is pirouetting to freedom. “Orlando” swaggers with a sprightly funk bounce as Hynes recalls getting beaten up after school.

And during the feel-good “Hope”, Puff Daddy ponders, “What’s it going to take for me not to be afraid to be loved, the way I really want to be loved?”

(Nick Harwood)

Each world-building production shows how melancholy can open up private space in the world, one that’s shared by the similarly dispossessed. The action here takes place in secluded confines, where the social pressure and narrow thinking outside become background noise.

Between songs, Hynes drops snippets from his interviews with Janet Mock, a black transgender writer and theorist. “I’ve always been hyper-conscious and aware of not going into spaces and seeking too much attention,” she says in one interlude. “Because a part of survival is being able to fit in, to quote-unquote ‘belong’. But so often, to belong means we have to shrink parts of ourselves...”

While Negro Swan elaborates on Hynes’s best work, he remains grounded in cosy bedroom-pop by shambling drum machines, vocal compressors and gratuitous psych pedals. Mantronix’s “King of the Beats” siren reverberates throughout the LP like a recurring dream, loaded with Proustian significance to hip-hop fans.

“Brother, we’ve seen it all and we’re tired,” Hynes sings on the A$AP Rocky-featuring “Chewing Gum”. In the company of friends, music and tradition, he’s made a kind of spiritual headquarters, somewhere the disheartened can take cover and, with an eye on tomorrow, regroup.