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Dev Hynes has announced that he will be releasing a new Blood Orange later this year, and it’s tentatively titled Freetown Sound. The album will be the follow-up to 2013’s Cupid Deluxe, and he officially announced the album through an interview with V Magazine. Speaking about the album, he says, “It’s like my version of Paul’s Boutique. It kind of plays like a long mixtape.” He later added, “It talks a lot about sexuality and displacement and life in the city—so it’s definitely very personal, but in doing that I think it’s probably the most relatable thing I’ve ever done.”
He went onto describe the subjects he discusses on the album in great detail, saying it’s a “very layered and very deep record.” No details on when we’ll be hearing material from the record, but what he says about Freetown Sound is very promising indeed.
Read the whole interview here, and read what he had to say about the album below.
This is a very layered and very deep record for me. There’s a lot of meaning behind all of the choices I’ve made for this one. It looks into my childhood and examines who I am at this point in my life. There are so many crazy layers to it that it’s actually quite hard to talk about it, but the record is very reflective of how my brain works. This is gonna sound terrifying, but there is a strong theme of Christianity on the record.
When I was growing up, Christianity was drilled into my head so intensely, to the point where, as a child, I was meant to be left-handed but was forced to use my right instead. Left-handedness was seen as a sign of darkness. Freetown Sound also has a lot to do with Freetown—the capital of Sierra Leone—which is where my dad is from. The record addresses the way Christianity was brought to West Africa and the way black households held on very tightly to Christianity because it was this beacon of hope…and how eventually this somehow led to someone in a school telling me not to use my left hand.
It’s been very interesting for me trying to understand and tie all of these things together. It’s been a way of working through it. There’s also a lot of stuff about race and specifically things that have happened to me.
