Back from a two-year hiatus, Banks' highly anticipated third album, III, will be out July 12 via Harvest Records.
After debuting his new project Blood Orange with a fairly straightforward chillwave/electro-pop album full of hooky, sexy songs that worked like a collection of great singles, Dev Hynes returned with a second album that was anything but straightforward. In fact, Cupid Deluxe is something of a hot mess. It's unfocused, sprawling, and so full of ideas that it never seems to settle in one place for very long, jumping from laid-back EDM pop to soft rock with sax balladry to '90s New Jack Swing to bleary hip-hop and back again. While it doesn't make for a smooth listen from beginning to end, Hynes and his expanded cast of collaborators (who include the ubiquitous Caroline Polachek of Chairlift, Friends' Samantha Urbani, Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth, and Clams Casino) hit enough highs to make the album worth trying to figure out.