As Blood Orange, New York-based artist Dev Hynes has released four deeply impressive albums of glossy, genre-fluid sounds. Angel’s Pulse is something a little different – described by London-born Hynes as a mixtape, the distinction comes in this being a release of between-projects material: an epilogue to last year’s exquisite Negro Swan. Normally, Hynes keeps these post-album sketches private, sharing with friends, sometimes even slipping a mixtape to a stranger on the street. For the first time he is sharing such a release with the wider world. Hynes’s albums sound like mixtapes anyway, the way his tracks delicately meld into one another being a stylistic constant. But everything here feels more muted, with motifs that nod quietly to its predecessor – Tuesday Feeling (Choose to Stay), for example, seems to channel the introductory melody of Runnin’. It’s immersive, but bar a couple of songs and features (Southern rap don Project Pat and enigmatic MC BennY RevivaL are both standouts) it lacks the urgency or vitality of its two predecessors. Instead, this is a lounge-y mixtape that drifts comfortably within Hynes’s beautiful sonic realm.
