FL caught up with the man behind the Blood Orange project, former Test Icicles and Lightspeed Champion genius Devonté Hynes, to discuss his brilliant record Coastal Grooves.

It’s an album that welcomes comparisons to recent one man bedroom projects including Twin Shadow’s Forget, Destroyer’s Kaputt and Wild Nothing’s Gemini Hynes says that if he released the album as Lightspeed Champion fans would probably really hate it, but don’t go calling it a side project.

What was the aesthetic you were aiming for with the Blood Orange project?
I was kind of subconsciously trying to do something that I would really like to listen to – that was pretty much the ultimate goal of it. Essentially things that I’m the biggest fan of, especially when I was younger, but trying to kind of put that all in. Because originally I was making mixes of songs and I was just listening to them and I’d give them to friends and I had to intention of putting them out in a widespread manner. So I guess I was just trying to please myself really, and it was completely self-indulgent. But then I slowly realised that self-indulgent is probably the only way you should be making music because otherwise why are you making it?

There is an element of the surreal, often dark side of nightlife on Coastal Grooves but also a really joyous feeling running through the songs – is that juxtaposition more a product of your childhood or more recent experiences?
It’s probably a mix of both really. I did spend a lot of time just walking around the city and taking my bike out and going for late night escapes. There was a lot of that and then I started thinking about childhood and having a very cinematic viewpoint of night time, freedom and escapism, so it was a mixture of both. I also watch a lot of movies, like daily, maybe like, two a day [laughs]. So a lot of the time when I was writing the songs I was watching movies at the exact same time – a very particular type I guess – and that was pretty much informing the music. Sometimes I was even pretending I was writing for the movie, imagining I’d been asked to do it or something.

A lot of the album sounds like it would be right at home on an 80s movie soundtrack – did the ideas within the films manifest themselves on the record?
Not really. I always tend to do lyrics last, and they tend to be semi-made-up scenarios that were kind of reflective of where my mind was at in some kind of way. There are no really direct moments, but the last song on the album, Champagne Coast, was written to the trailer of Romance of the Stone [laughs].

Coastal Grooves definitely gives off a feeling of solitude and being on the periphery of society – did you ever feel that way growing up or were those elements present merely as a result of the cultures and scenes you’re interested in?
Yeah, I guess I did feel that way growing up. Growing up in Romford, Essex, it’s a pretty, uh, ‘interesting’ place! I was spat on, on the bus daily… it was weird, I was actually never bullied at school – that’s the one thing, I really hated school but I wasn’t bullied there because I actually was on the football team and I was on the basketball team but I also played in the orchestra and stuff [laughs]. I find my interests are all over the place now and that’s how it was in school. I ended up covering a lot of ground and knowing a lot of people. Outside of school, people that didn’t know me – which I actually feel like it may be the case now in some kind of twisted way – just intimately didn’t like me! [laughs] And so I got beaten up a few times and put in hospital a couple of times. So I always felt like I wanted to escape, and eventually I did in various ways – but I always felt on the outside growing up.

The record deals with themes of escape but also things like nostalgia, yearning and regret – wishing things could have been different.
Yeah, I guess that does come across. I’ve always been interested in sadness and longing… a lot of the stuff on the album is written from a fake, almost female standpoint, not even an intelligent standpoint but a purely aesthetic and thematic standpoint. There are tales of longing and wishing you’d made the right choices – that’s all probably some kind of subconscious venting on my part.

Do you find yourself having to adopt a different mindset or even a different persona for each musical project or do the ideas all come naturally?
It really comes naturally – I really do wish that I could just go by my name or something, but people over-analyse everything, and if I called this album Lightspeed Champion they would probably really hate it! [laughs] The viewpoints and connotations are always present and I’m guilty of it myself. I do it to people all the time and you can’t help it but at the end of the day it really is just me. I’ve heard people refer to this as like a side project but it’s just me! [laughs] There’s never been anyone else. I always look at everything as like a straight chronological timeline and there’s nothing sprouting off.

So over what time period were the songs for Coastal Grooves written and how many didn’t make the album?
I actually wrote the majority of these songs in 2009 and maybe a few at the very beginning of 2010. I guess roughly 20 or so songs aren’t on the album, but that’s mainly because I finished recording the album around Easter or maybe June 2010 and I kind of kept writing. There was a mixtape I put out and it was all of those from somewhere around the time of the album but mostly afterwards, and they’re kind of all the songs that actually aren’t on the album. They don’t really fit because Coastal Grooves has quite a strong feel to it, it has more of a relaxed vibe, and there is a different feel to the songs written after the album. There’s a strong kind of Chris Isaak feel and maybe even Fox Bat Strategy, which I was listening to quite a bit. I guess a lot of those songs couldn’t really go on the album, and there’s a lot.