Dev Hynes was once scouted by a professional soccer league

Charlton Athletic took an interest in the artist behind Blood Orange.

August 23, 2018
Dev Hynes was once scouted by a professional soccer league Dev Hynes a.k.a Blood Orange performs onstage at the Meadows Music And Arts Festival. September 15, 2017.   Noam Galai/Getty Images

You might know Dev Hynes as the artist behind the influential pop/R&B project Blood Orange, but in a recent New York Times profile, Hynes said he believes his true talents lie in football, or soccer.

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As a teenager, Hynes was scouted by Charlton Athletic, a League One professional English football club "whose players often go on to the Premier League powerhouse Tottenham Hotspur." However, Hynes left the club at age 17 in favor of a brief attempt at English literature in East London. “'[Football] is what I was meant to do,'” Hynes told the Times. “'[Music] is not the thing that was meant to go down.'”

Lucky for us, music did go down, and Blood Orange will release his new album Negro Swan on August 24. Watch videos for "Charcoal Baby" and "Jewelry," plus a performance of "Chewing Gum" with A$AP Rocky on Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

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Dev Hynes was once scouted by a professional soccer league