May was a busy month in New York for Dev Hynes, as most months are. There was that night at the Dizzee Rascal show, and the one at American Ballet Theater. There was the basketball tournament at the art fair, and the late nights playing Ping-Pong in the West Village. There was the intimate performance in a Lower East Side bookstore, and rehearsals in Midtown for shows he’s about to perform to celebrate his new album, “Freetown Sound,” released under the alias Blood Orange.  It can seem that there’s not an inch of New York — not a block, not a scene, not a cultural ecosystem — where Mr. Hynes, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter-producer, hasn’t left a footprint. To many, the city is an unsolvable puzzle. For some, comprehension is possible, but only from a distance. Fluency, though, is something that’s in short supply. New York has always been a city of secrets, but some people seem to know all of them.  One recent night, Mr. Hynes was sitting in DeSalvio Playground in NoLIta, nibbling on a peanut butter cookie as the sun began to shrug. It’s a small spit of a park, the sort of place you might walk right past without noticing. But not Mr. Hynes. “I’m in this playground a lot, actually,” he said enthusiastically. This tiny corner is his, too.  That sort of engagement feels almost antiquated, a product of an older time when place was something close to destiny. That’s no longer the case. It is less essential than ever, in this time of easy mobility of ideas and internet-driven transnational fame, for an artist to identify with one spot in the world. To be, in essence, local.  But every so often, an artist becomes part of the city’s tapestry — not high nor low, mainstream nor underground. Just there. Mr. Hynes’s ubiquity has become a fact of 2010s New York. To follow him on Snapchat — he was a natural at self-documentation in the medium, right up until the moment this month when his account was hacked, then deleted — is to see an artist endlessly fascinated with this city’s many crevices.  A committed cultural citizen, he stands out among the New York musicians of his generation. Mr. Hynes’s modern bohemianism feels like a holdover from an earlier time, more reminiscent of the uptown-downtown cross-pollination of the early 1980s, or how Lou Reed bridged proto-punk and art, or how Warhol’s Factory took in the outcasts from all the city’s scenes and gave them a home.  His cultural life is broad and fluid, a throwback to when New York culture was less professionalized, more intimate and less segmented. “Freetown Sound” suggests a conversation with the city, navigating a host of styles while weaving in vocal snippets of local characters, from KRS-One to Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Mr. Hynes moved here from London, where he was born and raised, at 21, already a few years deep into making music (then, as part of the band Test Icicles, and as a solo artist under the alias Lightspeed Champion). “I was reading books about New York, like ‘Please Kill Me,’” he said, referring to the punk history. “I was super-inspired from it. When I came here, I was still always just pulling from the city.”  A history buff with an itchy Google finger, he owns a bookshelf full of titles about the city, which is his muse and text. He takes long walks, stumbles on things, gets curious, then goes and looks them up. (In Washington Square Park, he’s apt to give an impromptu lecture about the arches.)  Then he carries the history with him, to use as inspiration, and sometimes as source material: “I like the idea of these actual physical hubs, and what’s happened on those streets over time — there’s almost ghosts, traces of what’s been happening.”  And so Mr. Hynes makes the city his own. His cohort of collaborators and friends includes musicians, yes, but also dancers, writers, artists and at least one lampshade designer. He plays soccer in public parks and basketball in a court at a West Village public school (in a loose league that was begun many years ago by the Beastie Boys, no less). He hosted a benefit for a Harlem music school at the Apollo Theater. He plays small, intimate shows at bookstores, like one for a book release for the artist duo Easternsports, and provides scores for art installations at the Knockdown Center in Queens and elsewhere. When friends like Florence Welch have concerts, he goes.  But he’s also willing to follow his curiosity — a combination of a restless artistic imagination and a belief in the New York mythos. When he wants to see a ballet recital, he buys tickets. “There’s not, like, a special list,” he said. “I’m on the website buying like everyone else.”  And like anyone who’s lived in New York long enough to have a mental map that corresponds to his or her life, he has his own landmarks: the East Village block where his old apartment burned in a fire that took all of his possessions and his dog; Chelsea, where he had a studio a couple of years ago, in which he’d worked with the pop singer Carly Rae Jepsen, and which he left because “a fashion company wanted to use the space as storage.” Until recently, he had space in a walk-up office/studio on St. Marks Place that served as a communal hangout for friends, a recording space and a 24-hour pied-à-terre for creative exhalation. His preferred watering hole is the Fat Cat, a plain jazz bar in the West Village where he enjoys unwinding at the Ping-Pong table with his musician friends. “It’s such a hidden gem,” he said. “I like that it’s either old people or students and there’s no real in between. On the weekends sometimes you’ll get, maybe, like an office group.”  This is Mr. Hynes’s New York, elegant and mundane all at once. But even now, after almost a decade here, he said he doesn’t quite feel full ownership of the city, but rather sees it as “some kind of cool big brother that you’re kind of watching. They go out the door and you don’t quite know where they’ve gone, where they’re going, what they’re doing, but it seems cool. It’s half protectiveness, half aspiration.”  Which is why, when the opportunity presents itself to leave, as it often does, for touring, Mr. Hynes rarely takes the bait. “It’s just weird for me to take time out of my life,” he said, half-apologetic. For him, New York is home, and nourishment, and purpose. If he spent more time on the road, he said, “I wouldn’t be me.”  Dev Hynes will release “Freetown Sound,” his third album as Blood Orange, on Friday, July 1. It’s his most accomplished one yet, with the sweet romanticism and austere cool of new wave cut through with slashes of emotional, social and political sorrow. Here are edited excerpts from a conversation with him.  In what ways does your fascination with New York come out in your music, especially on this album?  A lot of the music I make, it’s music for me to listen to on headphones to soundtrack me just walking around. I get moods walking down streets that I think sound good in a certain way. What’s happened slowly over the last few years, instead of writing music that I pictured in certain parts of New York, now those parts of New York are actually in the music.  On an iPhone. Like, Houston and First at different times of the day. “Augustine” has this audio from Broadway. Some of it loops — if you pay attention to “Augustine,” then “Better Numb,” you can hear it’s the same motorbike going by, the same person saying something. There’s a lot of audio from Washington Square Park. One of my favorites is in “With Him” and also “Squash Squash” — it’s audio from Central Park. There was an opera singer, a female tenor under the bridge singing some Puccini piece, and also in the distance there was a saxophone player. I wrote a saxophone part that can lead from that.  This album has a lot of pastiche, but also the most melodically direct songs you’ve released.  Even though this album is more complex as a whole, I think each song is way simpler than my older songs. I was aware that I was going to be asking a lot of people anyway, so I wanted it to be digestible. I’m always trying to make my melodies as direct as possible. At least that’s what I’m attempting to do.  Is part of what you enjoy about working with female pop artists that they can go places you might not?  It’s half that, and it’s half I don’t know how! I was working with Carly Rae Jepsen again last week, and I love working with her because we can’t do what each other do. She’s such a pro. I’m aware of what I’m doing but I wouldn’t know how to make a song that sounds like “Sorry” or whatever — my brain just doesn’t go there.  How literal is your songwriting?  A lot of my songs sound like love songs, and they’re usually really not. “But You” is interesting. It’s actually about walking down a street, and me trying to work out what to do, say, if there’s like a young blond girl in front of me, and we’re the only ones on the street, and it’s me trying not to scare her walking — trying to work out if I should cross the road, if I should walk faster and try to speed past — but it’s kind of told through this shield.  So woven into these melodies is a the difficulties of living in a black body in a white society. Did you ever want to make a straightforward agit-pop album?  There was a large period before the songs that made this album when I was, like, pretty dark musically, but also I think it wasn’t good enough for release. The only other time that happened to me was the week after the Trayvon non-indictment. I made 10 songs I was gonna put out, and I was gonna try to do it under a different name, and then I just didn’t. It was more me just trying to work through things than me releasing to the world.  What work have you done that’s most political?  Maybe the first Lightspeed [Champion] album. It dealt with a lot of similar themes, like being black in a particularly white world. At the time no one particularly noticed. If that came out now with that political content, I think people would associate me with it more. The album was mainly about being a weird black kid, 80 percent of it. That is closest lyrically to this one.  What artists do you feel kinship with on these topics?  I would say Le1f. Kelela — the stuff she’s been working on now is really similar. Solange, of course. I really love Elysia Crampton. It’s kind of intense — there’s no vocals in it, but it still deals with being displaced. She’s transgender and dealing with being herself in this world. But you can feel it. And then there’s people that I look up to, like Kendrick.  Do you feel those messages, explicit or implicit, are more in tune with this political and social moment?  It definitely is, though it’s just where I’m at. Other people, if they make an album and things start coming out with similar themes, they start to freak out, but I’m kind of just like stoked on it. It shows I’m not alone in my thinking. We’re all in these different places in the world, at different places in our careers, thinking on the same wavelength. But who knows? People may listen to my album that have never listened to “Lemonade” or “To Pimp a Butterfly.”  It sounds like you are decentering your voice on this album. I’m wondering about that as deliberate aesthetic strategy, but also as a psychological strategy.  I definitely am always subconsciously and sometimes consciously trying to step back and let other things take center stage. I can only relate things to sports. It’s basically like, when I play soccer, I’m midfield, sometimes I’m like, left wing, and I enjoy it. Every now and then, I want to like maybe play striker. I’ll go forward and do it, then I’m like, ‘O.K., that’s enough of that,’ and go back and start making plays.  A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2016, on page AR18 of the New York edition with the headline: Fluent in the Secrets of New York. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The musician and London native is nourished by both the elegant and the mundane as he seeks out and studies the city’s many crevices and ghosts.