Dev Hynes’ new mixtape feels light and loose, a pre-production sketchbook presented as a charmingly finished product with the help of several key guests. On his new Blood Orange release, Angel’s Pulse, British singer, songwriter, producer, and composer Dev Hynes returns to the snapshot aesthetics of the cassette mixtape age, presenting his sketchbook as the product itself.
On previous albums, Hynes used the disarming, suggestive power of abrupt transitions to join together contrasting musical textures and moods. But while 2016’s Freetown Sound and 2018’s Negro Swan are cinematic both in their production and overarching themes, Angel’s Pulse, Blood Orange’s shortest collection of songs, feels like scanning radio stations in a lovingly nostalgic memory straight from the ’90s and early ’00s. The synth and drum machine-driven minimalism of “Baby Florence (Figure)” juts up against gauzy low-fi Southern hip-hop track “Gold Teeth” featuring Memphis legends Project Pat and Gangsta Boo. Low-key dance song “Dark and Handsome” featuring Toro Y Moi, turns chopped and screwed before giving way to the ’80s pop-tinted “Benzo.” There’s a joyful lightness to it all, helped in part by the fact Angel’s Pulse comes less than a year after the heavy but bracing survey of black queer alienation on Negro Swan.
| A1 | I Wanna C U | 1:14 |
| A2 | Something To Do | 0:51 |
| A3 | Dark & Handsome | 2:33 |
| A4 | Benzo | 2:30 |
| A5 | Birmingham | 1:33 |
| A6 | Good For You | 2:22 |
| A7 | Baby Florence (Figure) | 2:58 |
| B1 | Gold Teeth | 3:01 |
| B2 | Berlin | 1:58 |
| B3 | Tuesday Feeling (Choose To Stay) | 2:57 |
| B4 | Seven Hours Part 1 | 2:40 |
| B5 | Take It Back | 4:23 |
| B6 | Happiness | 2:09 |
| B7 | Today | 1:19 |
