Frank Ocean works throughout many mediums. Considered one of them, clearly, is music. One other, much less clearly, is carpentry—in Infinite, his 2016 album-slash-music-video, the songs soundtrack a gang of duplicate Franks constructing a staircase to nowhere. Nonetheless one other is jewellery. Ocean hasn’t correctly put out any music for the reason that singles “Pricey April” and “Cayendo” in 2020. As a substitute, in 2021 he based Homer, which makes all the things from easy silver bracelets to a diamond-encrusted “sphere legs” necklace, which Drake purchased for a cool $1.9m.
One other of Ocean’s favourite artwork types? The artwork of teasing, ever so elliptically, the prospect of latest music. The most recent set up on this ongoing efficiency piece is a flurry of Instagram story posts, which began popping up earlier this week. Together with the standard visible bric-a-brac—landscapes, in-car photographs, a topless selfie, a selfie in a go well with with an iced espresso—was a pic of Ocean within the studio enjoying bass. In a music studio? Enjoying a musical instrument? The omens are good.
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They usually is perhaps proved proper. Ocean may drop an album subsequent week. He may drop two albums subsequent week, like he did with Blonde and Infinite again to again in August 2016. However studying the runes of Ocean’s cryptic public statements is an endeavor that usually leads nowhere. Final November, he put up an entire minute of an unreleased monitor on his Instagram story. It was a wonderfully good 60 seconds of meandering vocals over a muted synth line. It heralded completely nothing.
Earlier in 2023, a merch drop of his included a poster with the road: “The recording artist has since modified his thoughts concerning the singles mannequin, and is once more excited about extra durational our bodies of labor.” Which is a flowery approach of claiming {that a} sure recording artist—hmm, who may that be?— has had sufficient of loosies and is able to launch a capital-A Album. Did he? No. Did his Coachella set that April result in an album as a substitute? Additionally no.
Ocean is aware of what he’s doing right here—that line on the poster was a coy tease, and one brimming with self-awareness, an acknowledgment that there exists a cottage trade of Frank oracles watching and analyzing his each motion. It additionally got here as a part of a really meta photoshoot, during which Succession star and Frank Ocean superfriend Jeremy Robust performed the function of the “Chairman” of a serious file label.
