On Dev Hynes: Essex Honey and the ground beneath us

Mustafa appears on two songs from Essex Honey, Dev Hynes’ fifth studio album as Blood Orange. Here, Mustafa – the musician, poet and former FACE cover star – writes about his creative relationship with Dev, and the emotional power of Essex Honey.

Dev Hynes’ left hand is gliding over the fingerboard of his cello. The water outside this shaded lanai leans in to listen. Unrivalled songs have been found on its shore for centuries, though I doubt it’s heard a voicing like Dev’s. We are in Goldeneye, Jamaica. The boys and I watch Dev’s shoulders rise as the notes bloom over Polachek’s spellbinding voice. This is the making of Essex Honey. Not an hour after the ceremony, Dev and I trade hood stories. We draw towards the water to hear its reaction: a knife fight that led to Dev’s arrest and a gun that led to mine. The weapon wheel is different, but the genesis of the violence is all the same.

It’s easy to overlook the war Dev has braced when you sink into the fractured beauty of the song Mind Loaded. How can such mercy know such cruelty? This is what makes Essex Honey. A bow where a knife fell, sailing over the strings like the closing of a wound. Unearthing a low voice like the opening of a wound. Dev’s basslines are bold and characterised. Still, they anchor every falling and flying voice above. He is solid ground. When a friend of Dev’s dies, he says, ​“the ground is missing”. Estates like ours take the ground away without warrant. The Jamaican water keeps begging us closer as we think of boys in our hoods who fell forever, without ground to land on or ground to die on. You need landing rights. You need dying rights. We listen to a new iteration of The Field and I spin and spin until the ground becomes water, and this is the closest I get to floating.

One year before Goldeneye, Dev and I are in Rue Boyer, an inconspicuous studio in Paris. Much of Paris feels hidden to me. Its restrained charm. On this day I’ll enter this album for the first time. He plays an early demo of Somewhere in Between, his truths are stripped of ornament, and he drags me to an ache I’ve long avoided. The drums are obedient and then absent for Dev’s wingless hope: ​“I just want to see again.” He holds the note until the grief settles. On this day I’ll sing on I Can Go. I try to restrain my adoration of him so my voice is uninterrupted. He rejects any pressure to sing, to write, to complete. He waits and waits in a devotional way. More meditation than session.

Dev has a fervent hold on all the instruments he plays, including the one in his chest. His grief spells itself without compromise, without correction. On The Last of England, every chord, lyric, vocal inflection and mix decision is Dev calling for his mother. It is his hand alone. Every flourish says her name; there is no escape. He warms the corners of the hospital with a lullaby of voices. Sometimes the truth matters little when we need to imagine a world stripped of its cold. Keep the skeleton, replace its skin. Seek refuge in a hope before you’ve even tracked it down. A true artist can walk us there. And then we repeat that hope, we ritualise it until it appears in real time. Dev makes a miracle of the mundane in this way; he makes use of the mundane. Dev finds stories in instruments that have forgotten what they possess. Some of us are fortunate enough to be those instruments. To be taken to the locked door inside us. To voice what’s behind it. No matter how thin our voices appear, Dev makes it communion.

We are in East London, in a makeshift studio. A bike ride away from Dev’s beginning. I try my hand at some unrestrained background vocals on Vivid Light that accidentally stay – Dev needs little more than himself to captivate. The freedoms of his process are being contested in this city. I remind him of the words of his fellow Brit, the poet Warsan Shire: ​“no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.” For homes like ours, those words are in the exact shape of our burdens.

We invite the giant, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, to the studio. She takes us to see her exhibition, To improvise a mountain. As we drive together in a cab, facing each other, I pressure Dev into playing her a few songs – I carry the Blood Orange banner above my head like an impatient son, while Dev just wants to watch a Champions’ League game. He yields. Both Lynette and Dev give wings to ordinary life. To watch her listening to him is a world unto itself. She is still as the city of London falters behind her. Her gaze is controlled, as if the song were a colour appearing before her. As if it’s her own paint drying on a cornerstone of black life that would’ve otherwise dissolved. What can happen to a story unguarded, but not if these two have a hold of it. A menagerie of strings like the stroke of a hand. The song grows dense with flourishes; the canvas grows dense with texture. Time and place are absent from Lynette’s paintings because time and space are age-old enemies of black life. They have been in mine. It’s why I see myself in her work. It’s why the city of London doesn’t fit in Dev’s hands the way it used to: he has not been afforded a home without teeth. As freely as he must move through cities to return to himself, is as freely as he must move between styles of music to build a mirror for a boy untethered from the most average existence. To keep transforming so you don’t end up missing in the clamour, the way Dev manipulates his voice and surrounds it with a host of distractions. His voice soars despite all that touches it; be it calamity or a lover’s arms.

Blood Orange is fertile ground. You cannot stay small on it. Dev refuses smallness of anyone in his orbit. Any voice can be his kingdom. Look at You opens with a cradle of synths before he confesses, in what may be the most piercing lyric on the album: ​“In your grace I looked for some meaning, and I found none.” From his first breath, you can feel Dev shedding layers of cultural baggage to reach for his own blood again.

Dev and I are on a train between two cities, and I want to tell him I love him, that’s it’s true and it’s undying. But he is in and out of sleep, so I press my affection against the window. I can’t, for the life of me, remember where we are heading or what we are leaving. But as we are suspended somewhere in between, I remember who we both lost – how they took their cues from the earth. And then every ground is missing, everywhere, and it’s only these songs keeping the sky together.