Blonde / Endless

At first, Frank Ocean was simply a great storyteller. Then he became the story—an avatar for all of our fluid modern ideals. He could be the dynamic human of the future, exploding age-old binaries with an eloquent note, melting racial divisions with a devastating turn of phrase or quick flit to falsetto. He breathed hope. Then he went away.

Years clicked by. It was easy to worry. There are precedents for this sort of thing, for disappearances, for the self-implosion of black genius. Lauryn Hill. Dave Chappelle. “Black stardom is rough,” Chris Rock once said. “You represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?” The Rock quote is from a 2012 profile of the reclusive D’Angelo, who felt compelled to release his first album in 14 years following the shooting of Michael Brown; the moment spurred him on.

Faced with a hellish loop of police brutality, other musical leaders like Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé came forth with brilliant righteousness as well. But not Frank. Though he posted several elegant messages online, reacting to horrors in Ferguson and Orlando, his relative silence only grew louder as tensions outside continued to rise. The stoic empathy he beamed throughout Channel Orange was missed. There was a yearning for his perspective—how he could soothe without losing sight of what’s important. How he allowed us to escape within his carefully drawn characters while never letting us off the hook. How his voice was allergic to nonsense, how it could shatter a heart into dust.

It still can. “RIP Trayvon, that nigga look just like me,” he sings on “Nikes,” the opening track from Blonde, his wary exhale of a new album. In the song’s video, Frank holds up a framed photo of the 17-year-old martyr, the boy’s sad eyes tucked inside a hoodie. Even now, four years after the Florida teen was shot and killed with Skittles in his pocket, the line jolts. It’s also the most overtly political statement Frank makes across the entire record. And “Nikes” is hardly a call to arms. The song is a woozy, faded, screwed-down odyssey, replete with helium warble and dewy third eye—and it’s actually one of the album’s most propulsive tracks.

On its surface, Blonde seems tremendously insular. Whereas Channel Orange showed off an expansive eclecticism, this album contracts at nearly every turn. Its spareness suggests a person in a small apartment with only a keyboard and a guitar and thoughts for company. But it isn’t just anyone emoting from the abyss, it’s Frank Ocean. In his hands, such intimacy attracts the ear, bubbles the brain, raises the flesh. These songs are not for marching, but they still serve a purpose. They’re about everyday lives, about the feat of just existing, which is a statement in its own right. Trayvon Martin would be 21 today, and Blonde is filled with feelings and ideas—deep love, heady philosophy, despondent loss—that he may have never had a chance to experience for himself. The stories Frank tells here find solace in sorrow. They’re fucked up and lonely, but not indulgent. They offer views into unseen places and overlooked souls. They console. They bleed. And yes, they cry.

The power of Frank’s work often comes via extreme transparency, but he’s not writing diaries. It’s about how he’s able to locate the crux of any situation, or expose undue artifice, or peel things back to their naked core. Like how he skewed L.A. privilege without breaking a sweat on “Super Rich Kids” or broke down the Coachella generation’s bored numbness in five minutes on “Novacane.” Recently, he’s expanded this skill beyond music. It’s in the “Nikes” video, which both takes advantage of movie magic, like lighting a man (Frank?!) on fire, only to deflate the trickery by also showing the crew of extinguishers putting him out. It’s in the oversized, seven pound, coffee table magazine Boys Don’t Cry, which came out along with the new album; in it, screenshots of internet histories—perhaps the most accurate mirror of our modern selves—are on full display, along with literally naked bodies on and around his beloved sports cars, and charmingly unfiltered interviews with fellow artists and friends. (These chats can get a bit stoner-y, though amusingly so; in one, Frank asks Lil B, “is money sexy?”)

And this transparency was also expressed in the current campaign’s prolonged rollout, which at one point had fans watching Frank watch paint dry as part of a live stream lead-up to a visual album called Endless. As a piece of filmed entertainment, Endless is painfully dull, and perhaps that’s the point. As we watch Frank build a spiral staircase with his bare hands, the piece offers a sort of anti-promo message that comments on how an album’s release strategy can often diminish the art it’s built to uphold nowadays. Or maybe, you know, it’s just really dull. Either way, the Endless soundtrack is much more exciting—46 minutes of music that plays like a mixtape, sliding from song to song, demo to demo, like scrolling through Frank’s hard drive of unreleased material. It’s an intriguing peek into his process, and it contains some of the rawest vocal takes he’s ever put out—like on the strung-out power ballad “Rushes”—but it lacks the clarity of Blonde. (In a neat inversion, it now looks like Frank used the relatively minor Endless to fulfill his major label contract and then self-released Blonde, the main event—though both were exclusives to Apple Music, putting into question what “self-released” even means at this point.)

With Blonde’s unobtrusive instrumentation—large swaths go by without any drums whatsoever—the album could be mistaken for background music. But then Frank’s voice enters, and the overall quietness turns into a soft spotlight, capturing attention. It’s a technique pioneered by noted minimalists like Brian Eno and Rick Rubin, both of whom are included in Blonde’s who’s who list of contributors and inspirations. Many tracks feel emptied, with only the plain strumming of an electric guitar or foggy atmospherics left behind. But they mesmerize. Even a song like “Nights,” which sounds straightforward at first with its shards of silvery chords and midtempo beat, eventually turns into a strange shredding solo before ending with what sounds like a Drake dream heard underwater. “Nights” is not an anomaly. It’s the album’s centerpiece, by an artist who is following nobody but himself.

Frank is 28 now, and his voice has grown stronger and more dexterous, while some of his tales have become more abstract. “Skyline To” is essentially a tone poem about sex, summer, and California haze backed by mood and mystery. “Godspeed” nods to gospel but stays grounded in its prayer to steadfast but broken love; a short story in the magazine, also called “Godspeed,” reads like uncanny science fiction but is actually based on Frank’s boyhood. Certain things are clear, though. The big questions are on his mind. He’s aware of his mortality now. He’s thinking about families, about what it means to live outside society, whether that’s a sustainable goal. He contemplates settling down with “two kids and a swimming pool” on “Seigfried,” a song that works in words by Elliott Smith and ends with a spaced-out soliloquy about living life in the red before a random solar flare brings chaos unto earth. This is not light fare. But the touch is oh so feathery. On “Solo,” he contemplates various stages of singledom, from the jacket-throwing hedonism to the smoked-out emptiness, with nothing but a churchly organ backing him up. It’s a stunning piece of songwriting that ultimately finds some peace with being alone. It sounds like a friend.

Later on, “Solo (Reprise)” marks the album’s only major vocal guest appearance, with a devastating, head-spinning verse from André 3000. It pinpoints one of Blonde’s major themes: nostalgia. André looks back on his 20 years in hip-hop and feels duped by rappers who don’t write their own rhymes. “I’m hummin’ and whistlin’ to those not deserving,” he says, amid a conclusion that will likely haunt Drake’s nightmares for years. “I’ve stumbled and lived every word, was I working just way too hard?” There is disappointment in his voice, and some bitterness. André’s disillusionment could be a cautionary tale for Frank, who often uses the album as an opportunity to look back with a rosy tint: climbing trees, Michael Jackson, cannonballs off the porch, Stevie Wonder. It makes sense for an artist who titled his first major project Nostalgia, Ultra. when he was only 23. Longing looks good on him, though, especially when he’s able to harness it to aching effect on “Self Control” and “White Ferrari,” songs that fight off despondency with a sadness that feels three-dimensional.

The album ends with a final look in the rearview, in the form of spliced-up old interviews with some of Frank’s young friends as well as his brother Ryan, who was around 11 at the time. A cozy keyboard rolls in the background as the boys talk about who they are and what they wish for. Carefree laughs—the kind that adults can’t seem to utter—are looped. Harsh static constantly intrudes, though, hinting at the distortions of time. These brief talks are also transcribed in the magazine alongside photos, and when asked about his dream superpowers, Ryan says, “I want to be invisible, I want to fly, and I want to be invincible.” His bright eyes peer out from under a Supreme cap and pink bandana. He looks like he might pull it all off.