Ears Wide Open: Blood Honey

Kevin Bronson on April 22nd, 2021

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Something sumptuous this way comes: Blood Honey, the vehicle for the music of Jackie Brontë and Kevin Williams, deal in brooding pop. Not to be confused with Portland’s Blood Honey, Northern California’s Blood Honey or North Wales’ Blood Honey (though we checked the latter out and rather like them), L.A.-based Blood Honey have a restrained vibe that echoes the trip-hop and electronic acts of the ’90s.

In a word: cool.

Brontë and Williams met through mutual friends, each putting their college education on hold, though for very different reasons. Williams, who was studying cognitive neuroscience, dropped out to pursue music. Brontë was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. “I spent most of my life bending to the will of other people and societal pressures, but this experience forced me to lean on my intuition and have faith in myself and my choices,” she says. “Now that I understand so closely how finite our time is here, I know I can’t spend it living for anyone but myself.”

Says Williams: “We started writing our first song the week after Jackie’s last surgery, which was an overall unstable time. I didn’t have a place to live. Jackie was in a lot of medical debt. Our music explores power balances and the struggle for control over addictions, relationships and emotions.”

Working with producer Adam Casilla (The Colourist), Blood Honey debuted in February with the mesmerizing original “Game Baby.” Says Brontë: “I felt so dysfunctional and naive trying to navigate different aspects of my life, post-cancer. That became a very familiar feeling for me, and this song is admitting that I sought out that same feeling and dysfunction in a romantic partner.”

After capturing and sharing their Joy Division cover in a live session, the duo today returned with their second single “Put You Out Like a Flame.” There’s something riveting about Brontë’s mix of talk-singing and cooing (we’ve always been a suckers for that), and the dialed-back production puts full focus on the song’s intentions.

“As an Asian woman, I get stereotyped as being soft and submissive,” Brontë says “In ‘Put You Out Like a Flame,’ I’m turning the tables on that trope and owning my power.”

||| Watch: The video for “Put You Out Like a Flame”