Man, I don’t think ANYONE understands how excited I get when Dev Hynes aka Blood Orange does ANYTHING. When he dropped Negro Swan I put it on repeat for about a month, when he was featured in GQ I bought the magazine (I never buy magazines), really whatever. So when he announced a while back that he was dropping a mixtape I got very very excited. I mean it hasn’t even been a year since Negro Swan dropped and we’re already getting new tracks? Sign me the fuck up!

This release lives up to the branding of mixtape. The tracks are pretty sporadic and don’t follow an over-arching theme. Hynes said that they were created in various different spaces and you can hear it. None of the tracks sound the same and all create their own words within the time-frame. God, Benzo is a masterpiece. It feels like it was created it the sweet spot between Freetown Sound and Negro Swan. In Hynes’ own words the song is about:”–feeling like no one sees your worth while at the same time knowing that’s a lack of self-worth anyway.” That’s beautiful man and really listen to how everything is molded together you can feel the emotion Hynes is trying to convey.  Something To Do is only fifty one seconds long and I love that song. I swear I had this on loop for 30 minutes. Hearing Dev sleepily sing the title behind these dreamy guitar chords and a synth pad. Then, this distorted guitar solo starts and it’s still fire? C’mon man, you can’t make this shit up.

There’s a lot and I mean a lot of features on here. Most I could’ve done without like fam I’d be so okay with never hearing Joba rap again. It just reminded me of how I never like his contributions to like any BROCKHAMPTON song. Well I don’t really care about any of the features on here except Ian, Chaz, Tinashe, Pat & Gangsta Boo, & BennY fucking RevivaL. Dude, if you don’t know who Benny is you can’t understand how wild it is that he’s on here. Bro is an internet enigma, nobody knows what he looks and because he wears masks everywhere he goes. His collection is something serious too. He fucking kills his verse too, rapping for a full two minutes and thirty seconds. While he raps his voice gets tuned up and down, it skips and becomes distorted, but it doesn’t get annoying. As for the other features, they just don’t do it for me. Which is bad because they make up a bulk of the tape, which is already not that long.

This project is solid. Definitely nowhere near my favorite Blood Orange project, like not even close, but it gets the job done. I’d definitely recommend it to music lovers especially if you’re trying to get into Dev. It shows off how versatile he is with his music production, while showing off his distinct style in the process.

Listen to Angel’s Pulse Here

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