Blood Orange should be the last artist to get the TikTok bump — not because Dev Hynes doesn’t deserve it but because the music that he makes under his Blood Orange alter-ego is so heady and immersive that it’s hard to imagine it making sense in 20-second chunks. Blood Orange has hooks, but they’re the kind of hooks that feel like crawling into a warm bath. You want to luxuriate inside those hooks, not to encounter them in barrages of distracting media blips. But the TikTok effect has come for Dev Hynes. A couple of weeks ago, Blood Orange’s 2011 song “Champagne Coast” went platinum, while 2018’s “Charcoal Baby” went gold. Those late-breaking successes feel utterly random, but they make their own kind of sense. If you’re a kid in search of a hazy, indolent late-summer vibe, you won’t find a better supplier of that feeling than Dev Hynes. Just wait until all those kids hear Essex Honey.
