Album Review: Blood Orange - Freetown Sound

4/5

Dev Hynes has carved an intriguing career in the space between pop and underground rock. The Londoner’s early projects — noise band Test Icicles, folk project Lightspeed Champion — were bravura feats of chameleonic invention, quirky but with a coherent vision. He has since quietly achieved success as behind-the-scenes hitmaker, writing for Solange Knowles, Kylie Minogue, Carly Rae Jepsen, and others.

With his third outing as Blood Orange, the now Brooklyn-based 30-year-old delivers perhaps his most sublime surprise yet: A funk and soul record that delves into third rail topics such as amorphous sexual identity and racial turmoil, while also reflecting on Hynes’s own journey from immigrant child to the dizzying echelons of New York music (“Freetown” refers to the capital of Sierra Leone, where his father lived prior to moving to the UK aged 21).