Frank Ocean makes music for people who deeply want to pick apart how music is made and how it does the things it does. This is the reason why albums such as his 2012 “Channel Orange’ and his recent release, “Blonde,” get met with such slobbering critical attention. There are a lot of reasons for this phenomenon, but the two biggest are his sense of chiseled minimalism, and his command of an adult sense of wistfulness as a dominant tone. These make Ocean’s albums stand out amid the racket of dance-ready hip-hop and R&B, a place where testosterone, aggressiveness and crass sexuality glare and dominate the airwaves. Ocean writes songs that wrestle with love, race, fame and commercialism, and even though the songs have their share of swear words and drug references, they always feel like a grown-up is speaking.

Nothing’s wasted, and that’s most conspicuous on “Nikes,” a song about excess that’s paradoxically cut down to nearly nothing, a high, digitally altered falsetto backed by a slow, mechanized beat. It’s an almost inhuman feeling song, but in contrast the sharpness of Ocean’s wordplay pops: “Said she need a ring like Carmelo,” he sings, “Must be on that white like Othello.” The first line compares a lover’s desire for a wedding ring to basketball great Carmelo Anthony’s desire for a championship ring. The second conjures Othello and Desdemona from “Othello,” as well as referencing cocaine use. That’s a lot of meaning packed into just two lines, and that sense of compression gives the song a power that belies the song’s sparseness. That power carries forward when he switches to more weighty subjects: ““Pour up for A$AP,” he sings, “RIP Pimp C/RIP Trayvon, that (racial epithet) look just like me.” Loss haunts the album. Ocean is always aware of its presence, and that awareness permeates each song.

“Ivy” dissects a failed relationship, saying “I ain't a kid no more/We'll never be those kids again.” In “Pink + White,” backed by Beyoncé, he meditates on hitting a high in relationships and fame, and on “Skyline To,” accompanied by rapper Kendrick Lamar, he meditates on the cost of taking refuge in sex and drugs. It’s all bare-bones, held together by the most fragile of structures. But even without a backing beat, the meter in his lines is ridiculously tight: “It's hell on Earth and the city's on fire,” he sings, on “Solo,” “Inhale, in hell there's heaven/There's a bull and a matador dueling in the sky/Inhale, in hell there's heaven.”

The shifting emphasis on “inhale” and “in hell” is startling, and commands attention, as does the multiple implied meanings: Taking refuge in a marijuana high, breathing the smoke of a burning world, even just stopping to breathe. He implies opposites — both hiding from the world and facing it — within the same lyric. The contrast causes tension, but also creates energy. Without dissection, it seems this power comes from nowhere — there’s barely any instrumentation to build upon, and his sense of restraint throughout the album is steadfast. “Mind over matter is magic,” he sings, in “White Ferrari,” where he explores the effects of excess. “I do magic/If you think about it it's over in no time.”

Nothing lasts in this album: Not love, not sex, not drug highs, not money. Certainly not fame: “I can't relate to my peers,” he sings on “Siegfried, “I'd rather live outside/I'd rather chip my pride than lose my mind out here.” Later, on “Futura Free,” he sings, “They tryna find 2Pac/Don't let 'em find 2Pac/He evade the press/He escape the stress” and then, “I feel like Selena/They wanna murder a (racial epithet)/Murder me like Selena.” The association with highly regarded musicians who died young is striking, and deepens the shadow in which the album’s drenched.

It’s in this raw honesty the soul of the album lies: Ocean is never trying to impress, he’s simply trying to create. In doing so, in expressing himself with a fierce ear toward his craft, he bypasses the emotional shorthand that’s drenched contemporary R&B, making his music bristle with a sense of truth.



Email Victor D. Infante at Victor.Infante@Telegram.com and follow him on Twitter @ocvictor.