Blood Orange, Essex Honey (digital outlets)

As mainstream pop has moved back the preeminence of single songs – largely driven by the need to get ears onto streaming platforms – the notion of an album its more pure sense has been steadily eroded.

It's not uncommon now for an artist to drip-feed three and sometimes more songs from their forthcoming album, and so the album becomes more like a compilation.

But elsewhere there are artists who aim for something more than soundbite singles, not necessarily full-blown concept albums as in the Seventies (although we have seen a return to that idea in the past two decades) but a collection of songs with a unifying thread.

Such albums can carry more collective weight than the individual songs, like Marvin Gaye's 1971's What's Going On exploring a divided America, damaged ecosystems and spiritual defeat in the Vietnam/Nixon era.

More than 50 years on, Gaye's titular question seems depressingly contemporary.

Blood Orange – British-born producer, composer Devonté Hynes – uses albums to explore personal narratives, emotional states and locations.

With numerous guests (Debbie Harry, Diddy, A$AP Rocky and Nellie Furtado among them) he pulled together elaborate albums referencing contemporary classical music, rap, pop, R'n'B, poetry and ambient sounds.

For this fifth BO album, Hynes explores growing up Black British in Essex with input from longtime collaborator/singer Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Everything But The Girl's Ben Watt, Sudanese-Canadian singer Mustafa . . .

The ballad Thinking Clean finds him a confused 13-year old (“what if everything was taken from beneath, I don't want to be here anymore”), Somewhere in Between looks back from further ahead: “And in the middle of your life, could you have taken some more time?”

Hynes couches emotional autobiography in colourful arrangements for strings, synths, saxophone and breezy pop, tying the spacious The Field (with Vinnie Reilly of Durutti Column) to the throbbing Underground drive of New Wave pop on The Train (King's Cross) to the choral sound of Mind Loaded (with Lorde).

Hynes reflects on suburban yearning in Countryside with Canadian singer Eva Tolkin (“take me away from the broken lights, take me away to the countryside”) and faces memories on The Last of England: “Ilford is the place that I hold dear”.

Refined music and thoughtful songs carrying collective personal, rather than Marvin-universal, weight.

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You can hear this album at Spotify here