Blood Orange Returns With "Essex_Honey.mp3," His First New Song of 2026

Blood Orange is back, and so is Essex Honey. Dev Hynes shared "Essex_Honey.mp3" on Friday morning, his first new song of 2026 and a clear echo — title, artwork and mood — of the album he released last summer.

The track pairs a wistful top-line synth with a clattering, old-school rave breakbeat and a long-buried Hynes signature: it samples Sky Ferreira's "Everything Is Embarrassing," the 2012 single that he co-wrote and produced and that helped put both of them on the cultural map in the first place. "The song sounds like it's trapped in hazy memory, and it's deeply rooted in the history of the Blood Orange project," Stereogum's Tom Breihan wrote in his post on the release.

Essex Honey itself arrived in July 2025 and was Hynes' first Blood Orange album in seven years, a guest-stacked record that featured Lorde, Caroline Polachek, Daniel Caesar, Turnstile frontman Brendan Yates, Mustafa, Ian Isiah, Tirzah, Naomi Scott and the writer Zadie Smith, among others. It landed on Pitchfork and Stereogum year-end lists, and Hynes spent the back half of 2025 touring North America, Canada, the UK and Europe behind it, including a stint opening for Lorde and Turnstile.

Cycling back to a song he produced more than a decade ago feels less like a gimmick than a thesis: Essex Honey was already an album obsessed with memory — childhood streets, lost friends, the strange continuity between teenage longing and adult grief. Sampling "Everything Is Embarrassing" inside its own coda turns the project into a closed loop, the kind of move you make when you're confident enough in the record to risk underlining it.

Tour Dates

There's no album announcement attached to "Essex_Honey.mp3" yet — only the song, the artwork, and the suggestion in the title that Hynes isn't done with the world he built last year. After seven years between proper Blood Orange records, even a postscript counts as a return.