After years of grasping at straws, reading tea leaves, countless false flags and a green baby, the stars might finally be aligning for a new Frank Ocean album.
In the most promising sign to date, Frank Ocean seems to have indicated that he's working on a longer body of work in his latest Blonded merch sale. In addition to the usual array of t-shirts and a vinyl repress of Blonde, the artist's most recent drop featured a pair of double-sided posters that featured a characteristically cryptic statement that seems to reference Frank's 2019 string of singles and how he appears to have moved on from that format.
“In the summer of 2019, Blonded produced a photo series shot on Thursday, Aug. 8, 2019 by photographer Michael Marcelle,” the block of text on the poster explains. “The photo series follows the story of a fictitious Recording Artist as he navigates the radio system. In one scene the actor Jeremy Strong plays a Chairman of a major record label. On the walls: a clock, two framed records. The Chairman is flanked by another figure. Both are dressed in suits, wearing ties, and are positioned behind a long boardroom table. They are opposite a shadowed figure in the foreground—the Recording Artist—whose subjectivity the viewer is to inhabit.”
\u201cBack sides of the posters from the recent Blonded merch sale tell a narrative that\u2019s as close to an album announcement as we\u2019ll ever get from Frank Ocean.\u201d— blonded.blog (@blonded.blog) 1673883684
Continuing to refer to himself as "the Recording Artist," Frank goes on to characterize the one-off model of releasing tracks as being "outdated," writing that “releasing singles is more suited to modern consumption habits where people curate their own playlists which are then shared within private circles.” Then comes the most promising part where he says, “The Recording Artist has since changed his mind about the singles model, and is again interested in more durational bodies of work.”
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Like most Frank album rumors, its worth taking it all with a grain of salt. However, given the fact that this comes on the heels of the news that he's set to headline Coachella this year, there just might be something more substantial on the horizon. In classic Frank fashion, "durational bodies of work" has enough vague ambiguity that doesn't necessarily mean a traditional record, but instead could be another staircase-building livestream like he did for visual album Endless the day before he dropped Blonde.
Photo via Getty/John Shearer/WireImage