Blood Orange - Negro Swan flac album

Where Hynes’ previous Blood Orange albums have stepped back from such sharply autobiographical touches, Negro Swan is peppered with them. It is also his most hopeful record to date. Following 2016’s politically minded Freetown Sound, the new album finds Hynes once again translating the diffuse way his mind works into pop-R&B that’s alternately slick and gritty, filled with carefully selected guests, samples, and seamless transitions.

Negro Swan is narrated by Janet Mock, the writer, activist, and filmmaker who recently made history as the first trans woman of color to write and direct an episode of television through her work on FX’s Pose. Just as Pose shows how the struggles of queer and trans people of color who built the ballroom culture of 1980s New York still resonate today, Negro Swan carries forward that battle of finding a family and forging a place for yourself in a world where you’re told you don’t belong. A cloud hangs over the album, the darkest Blood Orange record yet, an immersive experience that sometimes lacks the bright hooks that served as entry points to his earlier work. In their place is a contemporary blues sound and pained soul sound that envelopes you on moments like the blistering Nappy Wonder.

With his fourth album as Blood Orange, pop polymath Dev Hynes cherry picks jazz piano, unstructured guitar and A-class collaborators to create an introspective masterwork about the desire to be loved. Opening to the ambient sounds of New York traffic, ‘Negro Swan’ is another fantastic chapter in the career of music polymath Dev Hynes. In the two years since ‘Freetown Sound’, his last album as Blood Orange, the Ilford-born songwriter, producer, director, player of multiple instruments has travelled the world, hopping from – as he put it in a recent interview – hotel room or Airbnb, trying. 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. Release date: August 24 Record label: Domino.

Blood Orange has revealed the tracklist to his new album, Negro Swan, due for release later this month. Featured artists include Puff Daddy, Tei Shi, A$ AP Rocky, Project Pat, Ian Isiah, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and Steve Lacy. Other contributors to the album include Zuri Marley (daughter of Ziggy Marley and granddaughter of Bob), Amandla Stenberg, Kelsey Lu, Andrew Aged (of inc. no world ), Aaron Maine ( Porches ), Adam Bainbridge ( Kindness ), jazz group Onyx Collective, and more. Negro Swan was recorded in New York, Florence, Copenhagen, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Osaka.

Hynes’ forthcoming album Negro Swan is due out on Domino Records Aug. 24. The fourth Blood Orange record, Negro Swan follows the 2016 album Freetown Sound, which Paste ranked as having one of the 25 best album covers of 2016. Hynes most recently released two tracks as Blood Orange in February for Black History Month. Christoper & 6th and June 12th make up the aptly named Black History single

Negro Swan will be out on August 24 via Domino Records. My newest album is an exploration into my own and many types of black depression, an honest look at the corners of black existence, and the ongoing anxieties of queer/people of color," Hynes said in a statement this morning. A reach back into childhood and modern traumas, and the things we do to get through it all. The underlying thread through each piece on the album is the idea of hope, and the lights we can try to turn on within ourselves with a hopefully positive outcome of helping others out of their darkness. Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter. This article originally appeared on Noisey US.