Intelligence is overrated – in music. Good pop albums like Blood Orange's "Essex Honey" draw on the power of emotion.

He saw his mother die. Her death tore him from his everyday life into a state of grief. Musician Devonté Hynes sought solace in music. He came across a sad, atmospherically shimmering song by Sufjan Stevens. "What could I have done to raise you from the dead?" sings the New York singer-songwriter in "Forth of July," addressing his deceased mother.

Devonté Hynes was inspired by Sufjan Stevens to create his own funeral music. His new album, "Essex Honey," is a pop requiem that's as idiosyncratic as it is impressive. The elegiac repertoire also fits the autumn of relationships. It also feels like a hymn to all the artists who have influenced the versatile musician on his musical journey. There are many. Or is it all of them?

Devonté Hynes is a pop music Doctor Faust. Born in 1985 in Houston, Texas, to an African father and a South American mother, he later grew up in London. As a teenage music freak, he embraced all kinds of traditions with an unquenchable thirst.

He first gained exposure as a singer in the punk band Test Icicles, before later pursuing a solo career as a singer-songwriter under the pseudonym Lightspeed Champion. Since 2011, he has presented his music under the project title Blood Orange. In addition to his own projects, he accompanies singers like Solange Knowles as a producer, creates remixes for stars like Paul McCartney, and writes soundtracks for films and series.

The British producer, who now lives in New York, is considered one of the most accomplished and mature musicians on the international pop scene. However, he remains a child of his time. Despite his skill and knowledge, he has enriched music with an original work, but not with a new style. His work is largely based on the processing and blending of the past and the present.

This has long been typical of pop's presence. Once upon a time, music constantly reinvented itself, allowing each younger generation to cling to a distinctive sound. Today, pop sounds rarely have this identity-forming effect anymore. However, their digital instruments and tools are proving their worth in processing pop's legacy. In recent decades, producers and DJs have set the tone by injecting old sound clichés into the present. Meanwhile, intelligent technology is increasingly taking over this task of remembering.

Science fiction author William Gibson claimed years ago that remembering is increasingly less a cultural practice and more often a technical process—from photography to sampling. This seems to hold true for collective musical memory as well. But does it also apply to personal memories?

For the Requiem dedicated to his mother, Devonté Hynes also utilized all manner of digital tools to compositionally combine and alienate soul melodies, dance beats, and instrumental sounds of saxophone and cello. He also referenced a wide variety of traditions and musicians—from Johann Sebastian Bach to Elliott Smith. Ultimately, however, the work's profile is defined less by its rich material than by its idiosyncratic form.

His songs run counter to all the patterns and rules that apply to pop – and which AI can also adopt. Yet, in precisely this way, Devonté Hynes demonstrates how unimportant so-called intelligence actually is in music. Its organizing intervention, at least artistically, falls short of the dynamics of emotions. Because when it comes to life and death, as in "Essex Honey," the drama of emotion dominates in music.

Devonté Hynes has primarily been guided by emotional impulses. His grief is expressed not in controlled ways, but in spurts of sighing and blazing lamentation, then again in folk-like, floating memories. This leads to numerous fractures, to shifts in mood and tempo. Because one can empathically understand this dynamic, one experiences the sequence of disparate moments on "Essex Honey" as a coherent fusion.

Hynes once compared producing an album to writing a novel. "Essex Honey" feels literary in that its vocals are characterized by a polyphony that alternates between choral and dialogic, complemented by radio play-like interludes. Through doubt and conflict, Devonté Hynes' bright, almost childlike vocals repeatedly expand into different registers. Furthermore, the singer is accompanied by several guest vocalists.

The fourteen songs on "Essex Honey" form a kind of cycle, with the individual pieces stumbling into one another, so to speak. At times, it also seems as if the individual sounds and melodies are filtered out of noisy walls of sound that have forced their way into the musical flow as a beginning or end.

In the opener, "Look At You," eerie clouds of sound hang in the room before the shimmering mix of sounds begins to pulsate and the vocals dominate. Suddenly, however, the pull breaks, and snatches of conversation are inserted before being drowned out by a choir. The second track, "Thinking Clear," continues with heavy piano chords and a rhythm that seems to be painted on a bell; the vocals become entangled in a mantra—"I don't want to be here"—before the song concludes with a cello solo.

Such motifs and mantras shape the individual pieces – but they also reappear in later tracks on the album, either as echoes or like manic obsessions. The repetitions are symptomatic of a musical storytelling that spills over the boundaries of individual songs. It literally corresponds to the agitated consciousness and flickering emotions of the mourner. At times, individual songs may even seem a bit strained. With "Essex Honey," Devonté Hynes has succeeded in creating an album that doesn't establish a style, but sets a standard.