Album Review: Blood Orange - Freetown Sound

On paper, 17 tracks influenced by '80s dance music has the potential to be meandering, to say the least.

On Freetown Sound, Blood Orange (real name Dev Hynes) smashes all expectations, giving us an album that justifies its length. With its emphatic cover, overt politics and bits of spoken word between songs, this is his most ambitious work yet. However, like Kendrick Lamar's masterly To Pimp A Butterfly its strength lies in the fact that in addition to its "politics", which merely describe the lived-in experience of many, there are hooks — songs you remember first for their choruses. Then comes everything else, making for a rewarding listen that reveals more and more of itself over time.