Negro Swan

At times, Negro Swan crosses over from album and into a radio station from a world just outside ours; Dev Hynes has created a fabulous collection of cascading sounds.

Set over gorgeous production, and serving as a comforting reminder to black sheep and ugly ducklings everywhere that it pays to be true to one’s full self, Negro Swan is a dizzying triumph.

Negro Swan is a grand work that gives credit to the pioneers of the culture while building a path forward within that framework, placing Hynes firmly in the canon as one of the most insightful musicians of his generation.

Negro Swan sonically is as fluid as it is fragmented, synthesizing and bounding between bedsit post-punk, desolate dream pop, chillwave-coated quiet storm, and low-profile hip-hop soul.

Hynes impeccably orchestrates his jazzy art-funk, resulting in the best sounding music of his solo career.

The past few years have seen Dev Hynes become one of the most prominent, important voices in pop. Negro Swan builds upon this legacy.

It's this ability to capture both sides with equal commitment--the struggle and the resistance through self-love--that makes Negro Swan Hynes's most assured, accomplished, and significant album to date.

He isn’t interested in avoiding the unsavory details of life— instead, he finds ample space on Negro Swan to indulge them. Perhaps too little are those works that refuse to address the anxieties and gifts of black queerness, to turn its pains into pleasure the way Hynes does. It’s a habit shared by indefinable virtuosos like Prince or Michael Jackson; Negro Swan, like its 2016 predecessor Freetown Sound, proves that Hynes is of their caliber.

It's a rich and rewarding experience, one that offers a powerful glimpse into the everyday lives of those members of marginalized communities struggling for acceptance in an increasingly closed, divided, and hostile society.

Negro Swan is another sure-footed step forward. It’s rare that an artist can operate within the pop template, collaborate with household names and still produce work that can be considered as significantly culturally important, but that’s what Hynes manages.

Negro Swan feels like a collection of personal and cultural traumatic memories, and it also feels like an embrace--a call for young queer people of colour to have hope, feel beautiful, and be filled all the way up.

The album is littered with exquisite collaborations.

Here he leads by example, creating wonderfully complex, changeable music that dares to be different. [Oct 2018, p.109]

The fourth Blood Orange LP is equally powerful, and maybe even more personal than [2016’s Freetown Sound].

Hynes’ bold and moving album.

Intentionally or not, Hynes has surreptitiously convinced listeners to deeply engage with his art; we're digging for the grooves, searching out the hooks while questioning our own habits and assumptions, as we look for our own meaning in the music. And there's plenty in Negro Swan.

Negro Swan sees Hynes thoughtfully explore themes of racial and sexual identities and anxieties within songs that can be a s gorgeously vaporous as "Take Your Time," as ecstatically funky as "Charcoal Baby," or any state inbetween. [Oct 2018, p.24]

While Negro Swan elaborates on Hynes’s best work, he remains grounded in cosy bedroom-pop by shambling drum machines, vocal compressors and gratuitous psych pedals.

Slippery and cryptic, Negro Swan blurs boundaries between the finished and the unfinished; between focused deliberation and thrown-together spontaneity; between fly-on-the-wall conversations and self-contained songs; between indie experimentalism and overground pop; between insider and outsider, black and white, straight and gay, trans and cis; between taxing depletion and invigorating replenishment.

The ambition of Negro Swan calls to mind the vignette style of Frank Ocean's Endless and the conceptual vision of Solange's A Seat at the Table, but such comparisons only reveal how much sharper Hynes' writing needs to be. If we could hear the music inside his head; maybe it would make good on the promise of this album. For now, Blood Orange remains an artist who flirts with greatness but frustratingly continues to fall short.

Hynes creates a jazzy respite for the marginalized by brimming Negro Swan with horns, synth, and guitar even if only for an hour.

Perhaps Negro Swan is merely a step along the way, as Blood Orange continues to contend with monolithic, difficult ideas, but for now, this patchwork of sweltering grooves, amicable conversations, and urban ambience remains limited in its vision.

An album, according to Dev, about “black depression, black existence and the ongoing anxieties of queer / people of colour”, Negro Swan is a record that radiates these tensions; subtle and amorphous, it’s not the most immediate listen, but it’s undoubtedly one with real weight.

Ultimately, that’s the main problem here; just when you settle into Negro Swan’s groove, it changes tack, leaving you feeling weirdly unmoored from it and, worse, emotionally disconnected.