Frank Ocean’s sophomore album, the follow-up to 2012’s wildly acclaimed channel ORANGE, was first teased all the way back in 2014, but a July 2015 release date came and went without a trace of the new music. Fans were left with many questions and mouths agape, and it took another year for the murky picture to become spattered with more paint.
On 2 July an image of a library card posted on Ocean’s website showed cascading stamped dates, with some vigorously crossed out, but those remaining indicating a possible album release sometime in July or on 13 November. The due-date card was labelled ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ in the bottom left corner, an ode to the ancient belief once famously skewered by The Cure.
July passed to the sounds of weeping and gnashing teeth, but no new Frank Ocean songs. So we had to settle down and wait til November, right? Wrong. On 1 August a live video began to stream on the site boysdontcry.co, featuring a couple of workbenches in an otherwise spartan space which later opened out to reveal a giant boombox. Ocean appeared briefly amid orchestral grumblings and short spurts of industry. Following the stream, it seemed that the new album, now known as ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, would be released the following Friday, on 5 August.
Alas the anticipated date again passed with neither tune nor explanation, as fans began to feel like they were being punished, but for what rhyme or reason, and by this point expectation had turned into desparation, because the other music out there felt all played out. Fans needed a new Ocean opus, and they needed it pretty quickly or else they might burst.
Then on 19 August Ocean resurrected the weeks-old video stream, building a staircase in the workspace to the throbbing of new songs. Endless, a 45-minute visual album, was released exclusively via Apple Music. But most music fans remain uncomfortable with visual accompaniment beyond the confines of the conventional 3-minute pop song, and besides, the content on Endless was almost impossible to decipher.
Which made it something of a relief when, over the weekend, Ocean finally released his proper new work. Titled blond – ‘Boy’s Don’t Cry’ was instead the name of the magazine issued in four pop-up stores to accompany the release – and boasting a whole gamut of illustrious collaborators, the record was expected to cement the reputation of the preeminent purveyor of contemporary R&B.
Instead blond pulls us down another rabbit hole, adding another pane of glass to what increasingly appears like a hall of mirrors. Over sixty sprawling minutes a soulful smudge spreads from chamber to chamber, until Ocean’s last elongated croon reveals his long-awaited second album’s real release date, which audio analysts are still attempting to reconfigure, blurred as it us by a thick overlay of autotune.
