“Opening to the ambient sounds of New York traffic, ‘Negro Swan’ is another fantastic chapter in the career of music polymath Dev Hynes. In the two years since ‘Freetown Sound’, his last album as Blood Orange, the Ilford-born songwriter / producer / director / player of multiple instruments has travelled the world, hopping from – as he put it in a recent interview – “hotel room or Airbnb”, trying ”
“Negro Swan is the most introspective, important Blood Orange record yet”
“Dev Hynes released his last Blood Orange album, ‘Freetown Sound’, just weeks after a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. Freetown was his father’s birthplace in Sierra Leone; as a collection it disentangled the rhizomes of black culture in a world more attuned with white soul-bearing. Cameos from queer icons were dealt an even more somber context – a ubiquitous melancholy was tinged with ”
““You’re doing the most.” If you’re a queer person of color, you’ve probably heard the phrase thrown at you like a muzzle. It asks you to shrink, to silence the very traits you’ve built to survive in a world that doesn’t always love you. But “doing the most,” being “extra,” or acting “too much,” shouldn’t have to be a fault. There can be strength in that excess. Devonté “Dev” Hynes of Blood Orange ”
“Blood Orange's latest is a dreamy, sensual, and holistic album with a message.”
“Dev Hynes delivers praise songs to self-realization and fluidity, with help from Janet Mock, A$AP Rocky, P-Diddy and others.”
