Calling Ocean’s work “beautiful and thoughtful and authentic and full of sonic depth,” Cuchna explained to Pigeons and Planes why he selected the monastic R&B artist as Dissect’s newest subject: “Specifically, Blond(e) was like a Radiohead Kid A moment for me. Here’s this artist with a massive commercial yet artistically pure album in Channel Orange, and he follows it with a highly experimental, nuanced, and in many ways challenging album in Blond(e).”

After itemizing the obstacles leading to Blond(e), Cuchna steps back to invite listeners to trace a much longer timeline: the life story of Frank Ocean, née Christopher Edwin Breaux. The brief but thorough biography draws on details Ocean has shared previously: A young Ocean moved from Long Beach, California, to New Orleans with his mother, Katonya, often sitting in on her university classes. These courses, as well as car rides through Louisiana—and a formative encounter with Prince’s work—shaped his understanding of music and all it could encompass. It’s with this foundation that the podcast charts, as Cuchna narrates, “the evolution of Frank’s sound from the singer-songer structures of Channel Orange songs like ‘Thinkin Bout You’ to the intimate, atmospheric introspect of Blond(e) tracks like ‘White Ferrari’.” This commitment to mapping the arc of Ocean’s work—not just lyrically, but stylistically—lends Dissect a critical gravitas.

The podcast’s third season diverges from the first two both in its breadth and in its choice of subject. Cuchna also produced the first two seasons independently, while this third installation is the first since he announced a partnership with Spotify. The first season, which Cuchna shared in 2016 while working full-time, dove into the meaning and mechanics of Kendrick Lamar’s baroque To Pimp a Butterfly. The second season, which arrived in 2017, tackled the conundrum of Kanye West’s catalytic My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Both Lamar and West are fascinating subjects who have produced urgent, genre-shaping work. But their voices, especially Kanye’s, continue to ring loud in the chorus of public discourse. Put more plainly, it doesn’t feel like either man is going anywhere any time soon. Each of the rappers’ respective seasons, then, is less an exhaustive look at an artist’s growth and more an extensive examination of one milestone along the path to superstardom.

Ocean is, of course, a different sort of artist. Where Lamar and West are ubiquitous presences—with the latter certainly occupying far more tabloid real estate—Ocean is distant. For both Cuchna and listeners, mining his work is a more intimate, yet far-reaching, endeavor. This helps explain why the new season devotes ample time in its first episode to one of Ocean’s less-analyzed records, 2011’s Nostalgia, Ultra. The mixtape, which Ocean released early into his deal with Def Jam Records partly to force the label’s hand, offers a glimpse into his aesthetic leanings and his poetic tendencies. Cuchna’s parsing of the Coldplay-evoking “Strawberry Swing” takes care to name how Ocean telegraphs his anxieties in part through shifts in musical timbre: “As we listen, notice how the music begins sounding lo-fi and thin, as if Frank is in his room singing along to the cassette tape. Over time, that lo-fi sound gradually ascends with more clarity and fidelity, as if we’re being eased into Frank’s fantasy world of nostalgia.” It’s hard to contest the poetry of Ocean’s lyrics, but Cuchna’s decision to lead with production notes renders his analysis as immersive as the music itself.