Frank Ocean works across many mediums. One of them, obviously, is music. Another, less obviously, is carpentry—in Endless, his 2016 album-slash-music-video, the songs soundtrack a gang of duplicate Franks building a staircase to nowhere. Still another is jewelry. Ocean hasn’t properly put out any music since the singles “Dear April” and “Cayendo” in 2020. Instead, in 2021 he founded Homer, which makes everything from simple silver bracelets to a diamond-encrusted “sphere legs” necklace, which Drake bought for a cool $1.9m.
Another of Ocean’s favorite art forms? The art of teasing, ever so elliptically, the prospect of new music. The latest installation in this ongoing performance piece is a flurry of Instagram story posts, which started popping up earlier this week. Along with the usual visual bric-a-brac—landscapes, in-car photos, a topless selfie, a selfie in a suit with an iced coffee—was a pic of Ocean in the studio playing bass. In a music studio? Playing a musical instrument? The omens are good.
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And they might be proved right. Ocean might drop an album next week. He might drop two albums next week, like he did with Blonde and Endless back to back in August 2016. But reading the runes of Ocean’s cryptic public statements is an endeavor that often leads nowhere. Last November, he put up a whole minute of an unreleased track on his Instagram story. It was a perfectly nice 60 seconds of meandering vocals over a muted synth line. It heralded absolutely nothing.
Earlier in 2023, a merch drop of his included a poster with the line: “The recording artist has since changed his mind about the singles model, and is again interested in more durational bodies of work.” Which is a fancy way of saying that a certain recording artist—hmm, who could that be?— has had enough of loosies and is ready to release a capital-A Album. Did he? No. Did his Coachella set that April lead to an album instead? Also no.
Ocean knows what he’s doing here—that line on the poster was a coy tease, and one brimming with self-awareness, an acknowledgment that there exists a cottage industry of Frank oracles watching and analyzing his every movement. It also came as part of a very meta photoshoot, in which Succession star and Frank Ocean superfriend Jeremy Strong played the role of the “Chairman” of a major record label.
