Frank Ocean works throughout many mediums. Certainly one of them, clearly, is music. One other, much less clearly, is carpentry—in Limitless, 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 because the singles “Pricey April” and “Cayendo” in 2020. As an alternative, in 2021 he based Homer, which makes the whole lot 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 kinds? The artwork of teasing, ever so elliptically, the prospect of recent 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 same old 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 taking part in bass. In a music studio? Taking part in a musical instrument? The omens are good.
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And so they could be proved proper. Ocean may drop an album subsequent week. He may drop two albums subsequent week, like he did with Blonde and Limitless again to again in August 2016. However studying the runes of Ocean’s cryptic public statements is an endeavor that always leads nowhere. Final November, he put up a complete 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 involved in extra durational our bodies of labor.” Which is a flowery means 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 business of Frank oracles watching and analyzing his each motion. It additionally got here as a part of a really meta photoshoot, by which Succession star and Frank Ocean superfriend Jeremy Robust performed the function of the “Chairman” of a serious document label.
