Above all else, grief is intensely personal. Where hope is a thing with feathers, a flying, beautiful feeling we all recognize, grief is its opposite: a universal emotion that’s nonetheless mostly private and impossible to convey in its depths. Grief creates a gulf between you and other people. I find that ironic, given its universality. We’ll all lose someone or something foundational, but that certainty doesn’t make it any more legible. Though it does resonate; it does produce echoes in others.

The impenetrability of grief is a theme that sits at the center of Blood Orange’s fifth and latest album, Essex Honey, which is more than anything a collection of laments. Dev Hynes (the artist behind the pseudonym) is often serious and often wistful—see his albums Negro Swan and Cupid Deluxe—but here the tone is different, simpler and darker. Though the album isn’t without its moments of healing, those, too, are personal.

But the thing that I love about Essex Honey is its attempt to cross that unbridgeable chasm between Hynes’s grief and our own. He pulls us in even if his pain and ours remain separate. Essex Honey’s effectiveness is found in its details, in how Hynes is able to take us to the source of his grief; the room isn’t sealed, and now he’s bidding us enter.

From the beginning of Essex Honey, the mood is introspective and transportive. “Look at You” starts with a repeating-triplet synth, Hynes’s reverbed voice, and a thumping bass; its first lines allude to a deep loss. “In your grace, I looked for some meaning / But I found none, and I still search for a truth / Hard to look at you,” he sings.

In his second song, “Thinking Clean,” Hynes croons: “What if everything was taken from beneath? / I don’t want to be here anymore / One hundred and eighty-six / Miles per hour, time flows / What if everything was taken from beneath? / I don’t want to be here anymore.” He sings these lines so sweetly that it’s almost easy to miss his meaning here. But the repetition—it feels like a chant—drives the message home. Some typically melancholic piano stabs emphasize what we’re supposed to feel.

Hynes, however, is careful not to let his own gloom fully subsume his music. “Somewhere In Between” is more soulful and bops along beautifully, with a lone electric harmonica floating above the electric bass and plucked guitar. The lyrics are no less sad, though. “And if it’s nothing like they said, it’s somewhere in between / So I surrender to being just a body with tired limbs / When the world is in your hand you can’t be inside of it,” Hynes sings, in about as perfect a description of grief as I can think of. And then: “Know I can’t pretend to know everything ends / I just want to see again (Oh).” The track dissolves.

That dissonance between lyrics and music continues throughout the album. To me, that feels true to the experience of grieving: It’s not all sadness all the time—sometimes there’s joy, too. In “The Field,” Hynes braids a series of voices together, creating a polyphonic chorus singing a multivocal story of nostalgia and faded pasts. Even if it sounds sepia-toned, the lyrics pull no punches: “Hard to let you go / See you and I know why it’s always grey (It’s always grey, it’s always) / Hard to let you go (Oh) / Healthy as we pray (Yeah) for a journey home (For a journey home).”

In “The Field,” grief lives in the disconnect between the past and the present, the knowledge that things will never—can never—be the same again. We move forward because they can’t. On “Countryside,” grief becomes metaphorically embedded in the world around us: “Could it be that you’re alive?” a voice—not Hynes’s—sings. Are you “in the fields trying to hide”?

Ishould probably say here that for all its heavy themes and lyrics, Essex Honey is marvelously sweet. The production feels honeyed. Hynes plays to his strengths here, letting his voice sink into the guitars and synthesizers. Though that’s not always the case: On “The Last of England,” the song that deals most directly with the source of Hynes’s grief, the first thing we hear is archival audio—a mother, maybe?—saying, “That was so cutting-edge, that’s what you did! Now, back then, to be tapping into [unintelligible]…it’s a really powerful message.” It sounds like a parent appreciating her child’s creative achievements.

Then there’s a piano, and then Hynes himself. “Nothing more to do but leave / Following the corners of the room / A knitted heart, they gave to me / I wash my hands and stare into the drain,” he sings, putting us into the room where it happened. “Sitting in the dusk of the room you fell asleep, anyway / Time has made it seem we can talk /
But then they took you away.” And then an unexpected sonic change: insistent percussion, a tempo acceleration. Movement, life, heat—it’s all still there, even though part of him is still in that room where a loved one died.