Dev Hynes Is Music’s Most Masterful Curator

There’s a thread by which all the most disparate things in our neuron-dense brains are connected. Every scent, every fact, every song on the Madden 2004 soundtrack united by some invisible, unconscious linkage. We all possess it. It’s the reason Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle” smells like my aunt’s basement and why Dubra vodka tastes like disappointment.

Dev Hynes’s thread is sturdier than most people’s. Thicker or something. On Angel’s Pulse—his first mixtape and fifth release as Blood Orange—he zip-lines across it, bounding free-associatively between place, genre, and dimension with a preternatural ease. In the span of a brisk 30 minutes, Hynes is many things in many places—sullen and ecstatic, inhabiting 1999 Memphis and 1963 Birmingham, harmonizing with Tinashé, not harmonizing with Tinashé. He bops from mid-tempo New Wave to dirge-y narrative ballads to ’90s boom bap. It’s a hyperactive jaunt that, like the best Blood Orange projects, manages to seem as if it’s the result of some weird, algorithmic randomizer and purposeful, precise calculation.

In the lead-up to the mixtape’s release, Hynes told New York’s Craig Jenkins that the project was initially conceived as somewhat of a throw-away. He had planned to maybe distribute the collection of songs on cassette amongst a small group of friends (a kind of post-album creative cleanse ritual that he’s developed over the years). But as the tracks began to take form and he realized that, in 2019, no one really cares if you release a project less than a year after your previous one, he decided that it was something the world should hear.

Angel’s Pulse is steeped in the residue of his first intent, to make something special and intimate. With its confluence of Memphis Rap, Gospel, and Psych Rock, it’s the exact, eclectic, and idiosyncratic mixtape I can imagine Hynes making for one of his many famous pals. At 33, though, the U.K.-born artist is an accomplished, veteran musician whose discography includes forays into dance punk, indie folk, and HAIM. If anything musically eclectic and idiosyncratic is going to go down, it’s likely to be of his own making.

Even with all that in mind, there is still little that can be done to prepare oneself for the experience of hearing Project Pat’s “Yeah Nigga (We’re Gonna Rumble)” interpolated over impressionistic classical piano flourishes (“Gold Teeth”). That’s just Dev’s speed, though. Pat and fellow Memphis legend Gangsta Boo even bless the track with two, new trunk-rattling verses about—among other things—diamonds, money, and your girlfriend’s esophagus.

Elsewhere on the aforementioned Three 6 Mafia-Debussy mashup, Hynes manages to carve out space for a breathy, delicate chorus by the routinely overlooked, but highly-capable pop R&B singer Tinashé. He enlists her services again just a few songs later on “Choose to Stay,” where her lithe vocal runs punctuate each bar, as she and Hynes swirl around one another like stunt planes.

Hynes has a history of foregrounding women’s voices in his compositions, often using his own as a mere compliment; in the past, acts like Empress Of, Nelly Furtado, and Solange have been the beneficiaries of this chivalrous treatment. Angel’s Pulse boasts its own impressive cast of leading women. In addition to Tinashé and Gangsta Boo, New York-native Justine Skye makes a strong impression with a pair of performances on “Good For You” and “Take It Back” that call to mind early-aughts forbearers like Tamia and Myá. On the elegiac “Birmingham”—a ballad that evokes the infamous, 1963 Alabama church bombing—frequent frequent Blood Orange-collaborator Kelsey Lu takes centerstage, singing from the perspective of the mother of one of the three murdered, black schoolchildren.

Acquainting his audience to lesser-known voices and incorporating them into his orbit has also become a habit of Hynes’s. On last fall’s Negro Swan, it was the introduction of Ian Isiah’s melismatic falsetto. This time around, the most notable addition to the Blood Orange pantheon is the mysterious rapper and cult online figure BennY RevivaL. “Seven Hours Part 1” sounds like the type of obscure, late ‘80s rap gold Hynes might have found digging in the $1 cassette bin at some Brooklyn record store. RevivaL’s Hip-Hop, like Isiah’s Gospel, combines traditional form with a queer-er, more emotionally turbid sensibility. “Them Vicodins done got you blinded, dyin’, know you’re trying it / I’m typin’ what I’m writin’ then recording, hope they buyin’ it,” he raps stoically over a fizzing drum machine.

Unusual arrangements and unintuitive artist pairings are nothing new for Hynes. In the eight years since the first Blood Orange release, he has treated us to some inspired A&R work. His albums have included Toro y Moi rapping very convincingly, interviews with trans rights activist Janet Mock, a rare verse from Despot, and even an introspective spoken interlude from Puff Daddy himself.

How Hynes is able to place all these disparate elements together and have them make sense is not entirely a mystery. While his palette is broad, there are some clear sonic linchpins. Droning, siren-like sounds (and often actual sirens). Balmy synth chords. Those gossamer vocal melodies—all of those could be packaged into a “Blood Orange” software plug-in.

Last fall, in her profile of him for The New York Time Magazine, Lizzy Goodman argued that Hynes’s “central gift” is his ability to “assert his identity as an absence of one, to express his creative gifts while committing fully to none of them.” I think what can easily read as a lack of a consistent identity might be the presence of one so densely intersectional, multifaceted, and dynamic that it’s hard to pin down. Experiencing Hynes’s work — with all its variety, eccentricity, and curated randomness — can often feel like watching found footage. Everything down to the mixtape’s artwork has this paradoxical crude cut-and-paste, but unshakably beautiful quality to it. In a way the influences and emotions that reverberate through his music are like found objects — items mined from the rich fields of his life, the ferments of an enduringly-complicated, queer, and black experience.

Still, Angel’s Pulse feels like a feat. It’s the most “Blood Orange-y” Blood Orange project to date. With its genre ambivalence and its eclectic parts assembled in several different cities, with several different players, in several different countries, it epitomizes patchwork nature of modern music-making. Hynes’s compositions traverse styles, key signatures, and continents. It’s a move that only someone extremely scatter-brained, supremely focused, or both could pull off.

Originally Appeared on GQ