There’s a striking line in woozy opener “ Nikes”: “ RIP Trayvon, that ni**a looked just like me”. It makes for a dramatically intimate listen. Instead, each track is a moment that Ocean shares with a textured backdrop, shaped by keys, guitar, synths, or strings. There’s barely a beat anywhere on the album.

In all its understated, delicate, emotive, sophisticated beauty. The album had to be heard to be truly real.įast-forward three months and it’s real. This was more album talk over a two-month period than we got in the previous three and a half years. Chance The Rapper then told Complex, “ I know he’s away making a masterpiece”. Then not long after James Blake told Complex, “ he is onto something, he really is”. Malay, Ocean’s long-time producer, told Pitchfork, “ he’s been working super hard… I’m excited for everyone to hear it”. Then, in the spring of 2016, murmurings of an album began. He practically vanished, bar the odd Tumblr post every now and then, for 4 long years. The ascent was fast and sudden, just as fast and sudden as his subsequent fade into obscurity. It propelled Ocean straight to the top of the pack, marking him as a truly gifted songwriter, one of the best of his generation. One minute, he was an R&B smooth-crooner singing about the “ Sweet Life”, the next guiding us through “ Pyramids” in a dance-psych fog, and the next tenderly, powerfully, singing about “ Pink Matter”. Ocean revealed himself as a master chameleon on his debut, jumping from one genre into another like a pinball with extreme focus.

It’s been a long wait since the colourful and kaleidoscopic Channel Orange made sunny days that little bit warmer, and grey wet days that little bit more melancholy. The date that we were reacquainted with Frank Ocean.

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