Who Is the Sky
By David Byrne
As the most self-aware man in popular culture, 73-year-old David Byrne might well ask, “Who is the sky?”
Well, he’s this guy whose discomforts, droll observations and tinder-dry humour propelled Talking Heads into public consciousness then walked his audience through percussive Afro-influenced pop and world music in his solo career.
Here, with the Ghost Train Orchestra’s horns and strings, he reverts to immediately familiar, mid-period Talking Heads for quizzical, rhythm-driven pop (Everybody Laughs) and pokes targets close to home: the typically quirky sentiment and sonic circus bleep-pop of My Apartment is My Friend; The Avant Garde aimed at his own brainy and hip constituency: “It’s deceptively weighty, profoundly absurd. It’s whatever fits, it’s the avant garde. And it doesn’t mean shit.”
He’s newly married but we might be unwise to read the personal in She Explains Things To Me and A Door Called No: “Then I met a girl, she gave me a kiss, I discovered a world whеre the door says ‘yes’.”
Byrne milks mundane opposites (“love is cold/hot”, “everybody lives/dies”) and is playful, as on I Met The Buddha at a Downtown Party, where the Buddha says: “I had to retire from that enlightenment biz. I don’t have the answers, and I never did … I’m not that smart.”
So the sky? It’s Byrne having gently provocative, amiable and danceable fun.
Essex Honey
By Blood Orange
Some albums carry a collective weight, like Marvin Gaye’s 1971 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 (Deborah Harry, Diddy, A$AP Rocky and Nelly Furtado among them) he has 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 long-time collaborator/singer Caroline Polachek, Lorde, Everything But The Girl’s Ben Watt and 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 any more”); while 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 guitarist Vinnie Reilly of Durutti Column) and the throbbing London-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.”
An impressive album carrying collective personal, rather than Gaye’s universal, weight.
These albums are available digitally, on CD and vinyl.
David Byrne and his 13-piece band play Auckland’s Spark Arena, January 14, 2026.
