When Devonté “Dev” Hynes speaks most clearly, it is usually through a woman’s voice. Hynes’ debut album as Blood Orange, 2011’s Coastal Grooves, was in large part written from a female viewpoint. In the meantime, Hynes has helped craft songs for a procession of kindred-spirit female pop singers, including Sky Ferreira (2012’s “Everything Is Embarrassing”), Solange (the same year’s “Losing You”), and Carly Rae Jepsen (2015’s “All That”). Women were also prominent on Blood Orange’s sophomore album, 2013’s Cupid Deluxe, led by Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek and ex-Friends vocalist Samantha Urbani.
Blood Orange’s third album, the newly released Freetown Sound, features an impressive roster of guests ranging from journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates to emerging neo-R&B crooners Ian Isiah and Starchild. Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly and Kindness mastermind Adam Bainbridge also contribute. But Hynes, true to form, shares the spotlight most with women, some already widely celebrated (Debbie Harry, Nelly Furtado, Jepsen) and others perhaps on their way (Empress Of, Kelsey Lu). Asked about working predominantly with female singers, Hynes told a recent interviewer, “I guess I just view women higher.” He added: “I don’t know what it is. I think women are so powerful. Not just in the fact that I genuinely prefer female voices—that is a big part of it—but there’s also a particular power that women can put across that men just can’t.” Here’s a guide to the women whose power lights up Freetown Sound.
Ava Raiin
Role: Vocals on “By Ourselves,” “Augustine,” “Juicy 1-4,” “Thank You”
This New York-based singer has called her artistic perspective “honest, introspective, ethereal, left-field”—all words that just as easily apply to Blood Orange’s music. Born Michelle Renee in Minneapolis, with an upbringing split between Minnesota and Texas, Ava Raiin has taken the stage alongside Hynes as well as others in his immediate orbit, such as Jepsen and Solange. She has also sung with Chrisette Michele and Melissa Etheridge. Besides lending vocals to key moments across Freetown Sound, Ava Raiin has been at work on solo music, such as the heady, booming R&B of recent video selection “Eagle Eye,” below.
Empress Of
Role: Vocals on “Best To You”
“I’m only an image of what you see,” Lorely Rodriguez sings on her latest single as Empress Of, the thrillingly thoughtful synth-pop strut “Woman Is a Word,” adding, “You don’t know me.” But more and more listeners are becoming aware of the Los Angeles singer, songwriter, and producer, who released her debut album, simply titled Me, last year via XL Recordings/Terrible. For the Yours Truly video series, Hynes backed her on cello (see “Icon” below), an instrument he takes up again on their lushly heartbroken Freetown Sound duet, “Best To You.”
Debbie Harry
Role: Vocals on “E.V.P.”
The Blondie lead singer should need no introduction, but it’s remarkable how deep the Hynes connection goes. Aside from singing amid the “Rapure”-ous disco-funk of Freetown Sound’s “E.V.P.,” she has also said the upcoming Blondie full-length will include a song written by the Blood Orange maestro. (That’s alongside planned tunes from Charli XCX, Sia, and Johnny Marr.) Harry and Hynes were both on the long list of performers for the Tibet House Benefit Concert 2015 at Carnegie Hall in March 2015.
BEA1991
Role: Vocals/songwriting on “With Him,” “E.V.P.,” and “Squash Squash”
The Dutch artist currently recording as BEA1991 keeps biographical details at a minimum in her online presences, but some searching reveals she’s the same person the Freetown Sound liner notes credit for songwriting as Beatriz de Rijke. After previously going by Bea and other pop monikers, de Rijke’s latest incarnation received Hynes’s social-media endorsement in May 2015. Aside from multiple credits on Blood Orange’s latest, her most recent songs online include the moody, herky-jerk electro-soul of “candid breaks the strain,” below.
Nelly Furtado
Role: Vocals/songwriting on “Hadron Collider”
Nelly Furtado, like Hynes, has always maintained a complicated relationship with commercial appeal. Though she had her biggest U.S. hits a decade ago with playful dance-pop like the Timbaland-featuring “Promiscuous,” from her 2006 album Loose, she wasn’t one to pander. As far back as her 2000 debut Whoa, Nelly!, she was addressing what might now seem like an old-fashioned divide between mainstream pop and less conventional modes: “You liked me until you heard my shit on the radio,” she sang to crowds that, indeed, had heard her breakout single “I’m Like a Bird” over the airwaves. “Hadron Collider,” her wistfully downtempo collaboration with Hynes on Freetown Sound, takes its name from the world’s strongest particle accelerator, and the two released it on cassette when they performed together with Solange last December at the Apollo. “We should be dancing with the angels,” she and Hynes harmonize here, “A thousand halos in the sky / But we’re far from heaven.”
Kelsey Lu
Role: Vocals on “Chance”; “organization of tracks idea” on “Better Numb”
This multi-instrumentalist embodies Hynes’s affinity for strange meeting points between classical, pop, and the avant-garde. Like Hynes (and Arthur Russell), Kelsey Lu sings and plays cello. On her upcoming Church EP, due out July 8 on True Panther Sounds, she combines those with a loop pedal for austere, affecting tracks that invoke an element of the sacred—perhaps reflecting her upbringing in a devoutly religious family in North Carolina before moving to New York. Lu was among the performers with Blood Orange at the same Apollo benefit shows as Furtado and Solange. The two met as part of a short film commissioned by Derek Lam, then realized they “ride along a very similar creative wavelength,” she has said.
Carly Rae Jepsen
Role: Vocals on “Better Than Me”
The “Call Me Maybe” hitmaker epitomizes the type of obliquely angled pop singer with whom Hynes collaborates best. Since her Scooter Braun-aided rise to throwing-the-first-pitch status, she has released an album, 2015’sE•MO•TION, that played like a certain synth-pop ideal without actually turning out to be that popular. An early standout from the record was the Hynes co-write “All That,” and she returns the favor here on a brooding number that he has said is “about a weird jealousy with [feeling] not black enough or not queer enough,” though he clarifies, “I don’t know if she knows that’s what it’s about.”
Zuri Marley
Role: Vocals on “Love Ya”
The granddaughter of Bob Marley, and daughter of his first son Ziggy, Zuri Marley is a musician, actress, and artist. She sings on Freetown Sound’s “Love Ya,” a cover of “Come on Let Me Love You” by Eddy Grant, a British singer who hailed from Guyana, where Hynes’s mother was born. On a song that also includes a clip of a woman describing the conflict in Sierra Leone in the native language of Hynes’s father, Zuri Marley’s presence adds a further layer of potential interpretations, pointing to the importance of family and, well, roots.
Ashlee Haze
Role: Sampled on “By Ourselves”
Atlanta poet Ashlee Haze’s sampled voice is heard amid the swirling ambience on Freetown Sounds opener, reading her poem “For Colored Girls (The Missy Elliott Poem).” Crucially, she can be heard declaring that “feminism is Da Brat, Missy Elliott, Lil Kim, and Angie Martinez, on the ‘Not Tonight’ track.” Elliott herself heard the poem and surprised Haze with a visit earlier this year.
Venus Xtravaganza
Role: Sampled on “Desirée”
In this transgender performer’s monologue from the 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning, she compares the sex work she did in order to earn money for sex reassignment surgery to a bourgeois woman having marital relations so her husband will “buy her a washer and dryer set.” It appears on a Freetown Sound track co-written by Hynes and Wimberley. When Hynes sings here, “Is anyone your friend?,” a context of transactional relationships has been set. And in the most tragic of ways: Before filming of the iconic film about New York’s ballroom subculture was complete, Xtravaganza was found strangled.
Deana Lawson
Role: Cover photograph
Brooklyn-based photographer Deana Lawson is renowned for profoundly intimate portraits of strangers. Freetown Sound’s cover photo is her 2009 image“Binky & Tony Forever.” The critic Greg Tate has written, “Her work seems always about the desire to represent social intimacies that defy stereotype and pathology while subtly acknowledging the vitality of lives abandoned by the dominant social order.” Lawson once told an interviewer that she was “interested in the flesh and the familial, from the most profane to the sacred.”
My 3rd album FREETOWN SOUND coming soon. Cover by the incredible Deana Lawson. See you this weekend at Roots Picnic. pic.twitter.com/lo0HvMuo9q
— Devonté Hynes (@devhynes) June 2, 2016