Five years after his landmark album Channel Orange and a projected gestation, Frank Ocean released his latest album on Saturday night. Called Blond, it was released as an exclusive to Apple Music.
Fans in New York, Chicago, London and Los Angeles meanwhile, could pick up physical copies of the record at pop-up stores. Queues snaked around the block in New York where there were reports of free copies being handed out.
At the stores, the album came packaged with a Frank Ocean-edited, 360-page glossy magazine called Boys Don’t Cry, long expected to be the title of the record itself. The magazine features photographs taken by Ocean, an interview with his mother, horoscopes and the lyrics of a rap called The MacDonalds Man written by Kanye West.
The album itself has 17 tracks; some reported that the physical copy has a slightly different tracklisting to the version streaming on Apple Music.
There is also some ambiguity about the album’s title. Listed as Blonde on Apple Music, the sleeve artwork spells it Blond. The sleeve features a picture of Ocean with green hair, photographed last year by the Turner prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans.
On first listen, Blond is boundary-pushing and introspective soul on which Ocean’s voice is often distorted; long stretches of songs don’t have drums and obvious hits are far from immediately apparent. A list of collaborators includes Andre 3000, Beyonce, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Pharrell Williams, Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, Arca, Fish, Gang of Four and even David Bowie and the Beatles.
The album’s long-awaited release was first heralded at the start of this month, when Ocean posted online a video of himself cutting up wood in a studio to snippets of music.
On Friday, Ocean released another longform piece of music called Endless, a 45-minute, 18-track “visual album” which takes a free-form approach to songwriting, and which the Guardian described as “brilliantly confounding.”
On Saturday morning, Ocean debuted the first single from Blonde, Nikes. The song pays tribute to Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old shot by George Zimmerman. His voice eerily speeded up, Ocean sings that Martin “looked just like me”.
The video, meanwhile, is a torrent of surreal imagery including a rapping chihuahua, a man clambering over theatre seats while dressed as Satan, naked backsides covered in glitter and Ocean rolling around a stage dressed in white.
Ocean’s reputation as a fearless and agenda-setting artist has not diminished in his years away from the limelight; Blond is sure to be endlessly dissected over the coming days.
On his Tumblr, Ocean posted a piece of writing about an experience of riding in a car while high on magic mushrooms, and also a note which was more straightforward: “I had the time of my life making all of this. Thank you all. Especially those of you who never let me forget I had to finish. Which is basically every one of y’all. Haha. Love you.”
