Four years ago, we heard Frank Ocean fretting in the back of a taxi, begging the driver to lend an ear. “Taxi-driver / Be my shrink for the hour / Leave the meter running,” he sang, on “Bad Religion,” from “channel ORANGE.” “It’s rush hour, so take the streets if you wanna / Just outrun the demons, could you?” Now Ocean has turned to flashier vehicles to help him outrun those demons. During the week that he released his new project, after years of delays, he was filmed street-racing sports cars in Los Angeles with the rappers A$AP Rocky and Tyler, the Creator. His long-standing fascination with cars is a focal point of Ocean’s ambitiously subdued new work, which has three parts: a forty-five-minute black-and-white video, titled “Endless,” in which Ocean builds a wooden spiral staircase, set to gauzy, lo-fi music; a hefty magazine called Boys Don’t Cry, distributed at pop-up shops in four cities; and an album—in the loosest sense of the word—called “Blonde.”

The project is sprawling, but cars offer a through-line. One of the magazine’s essays is about Ocean’s habit of running out of gas, and he fills its pages with photographs of vintage BMWs, of engine wreckage and racetracks, and snapshots of black men with luxury-car logos shaved into the backs of their heads. Instead of commissioning Kanye West to contribute a verse or a beat, Ocean asked him to write a poem, and had him pose for photographs in a black Lamborghini at a drive-through. Ocean uses cars as narrative signposts in his lyrics: “Remember when I had that Lexus / No? / Our friendship don’t go back that far,” he sings. On one song, he reminisces about his family’s Acura; on another, he recalls the BMW X6 that he owned at a time when “everything sucked.” Another track is simply titled “White Ferrari.”

Maybe Ocean’s auto fixation really is about outrunning demons. Maybe it’s a complicated expression of his masculinity—“a deep subconscious straight boy fantasy,” he speculates in his essay—or a testament to the solitude that cars afford those with hermetic tendencies. Or maybe it’s not so deep—perhaps Ocean is just a bored obsessive with money to blow. In his dreamy, impressionistic world, his artistic choices can seem banal and tossed off, or pointed and profound. It’s not surprising that the social-media platform he uses most often is Tumblr—a site that has become a sea of niche preoccupations explored through evocative photographs, often shared by teen-agers.

When Ocean first became popular, early this decade, he was lauded as an R. & B. deconstructionist, reviving a genre that was thought to have ossified. Born Christopher Breaux and raised in New Orleans, he was a quiet sage who fell in with a pack of irreverent skate rats and rappers in Los Angeles known as Odd Future. While they wreaked havoc, he hung back and observed. While they made raucous soundtracks for aspiring suburban delinquents, Ocean produced calm collages—first, in 2011, a mixtape called “Nostalgia, Ultra” (its cover art features a car), and then, in 2012, his début major-label album, “channel ORANGE.” He was creating a kind of meditative soul music, in the tradition of Al Green and D’Angelo, but Ocean updated the form with lo-fi interludes that poeticized a digitally born form of attention-deficit disorder.

When you listen to “Blonde,” characterizations like “R. & B. deconstructionist” suddenly feel insufficient. If Ocean was ever interested in toying with genre conventions, he has since widened his gaze. These days, his work feels not only post-genre but post-album, and even post-song. For “Blonde,” Ocean worked with a number of collaborators—from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood to Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar—but he has chosen not to reveal which parts they helped create, perhaps because it’s difficult to tease out discrete elements. Very few songs feature backing drums or choruses, and anything resembling a hook is scarce. Ocean drifts through faint guitars and heavy reverb, stripes of folk-rock, ambient electronic music and gospel, all of which builds into a cotton-candy haze. He raps; he sings; he speaks; he recites. He often uses digital filters, which make his voice sound cartoonish and unrecognizably high. The result is a kind of listless beauty. The effect is soothing, but it can leave you longing for the clean lines of conventional song structures and sticky one-liners. At a time when a pop lyric is only as strong as its potential to become a T-shirt logo or an Instagram caption, Ocean is a genuine misfit. His free-form lyrics are a no-hashtag zone.

In the years between “channel ORANGE” and the new project, Ocean has tantalized fans by leaving a misleading trail of breadcrumbs. Earlier this year, on his Tumblr, he published a photo of a library card stamped with dozens of dates. But none of these was the final release date for his new work. (The staircase that Ocean painstakingly constructs in the “Endless” video leads only to the ceiling.) But “Blonde” and its counterparts depict the artist living a rich and full life, not hand-wringing in a studio or sitting in A. & R. meetings strategizing about his next move. He rarely grapples with his place in the world or the toll that celebrity and speculation have taken on him. (There’s one exception: on the final song of the album, which runs nine minutes, he sings, “They wanna murder a nigga / Murder me like Selena,” comparing himself to the Latin pop star, who was shot to death in 1995.)

Instead, Ocean seems to have lived the past four years in a state of wonder. He has travelled widely, cultivated an interest in visual artists ranging from Renoir to Jenny Holzer, and forged a friendship with the outré Bay Area rapper Lil B. In the magazine, he publishes screenshots of Web searches for “how to do a burpee” and “classic opera music.” He has taken lovers, and developed a complicated relationship with marijuana, a drug whose effects his mother warns him about in a sweet voice mail that he includes on “Blonde.” He has established an intimate familiarity with luxury brands, the names of which roll off his tongue with an attitude of disdainful boredom: “Comme des Garçons, Comme des Garçons,” he chants on “Endless.” He has collected experiences as if they were seashells on a psychedelic beach, and then perhaps discarded some of them before he got home. The music doesn’t reveal any profound truths about Ocean, but for many listeners it will provoke plenty of misty-eyed revelations about their own lives.

Ocean is not the first artist of his stature to experiment with the shape of an album. Earlier this year, Beyoncé released “Lemonade,” which took the form of an hour-long film stitched together with the words of the contemporary poet Warsan Shire. In February, at Madison Square Garden, Kanye West held a listening party for his new album, “The Life of Pablo,” which doubled as a fashion show for his clothing line, Yeezy.

There is a growing expectation that, in order to make good on their prominence, these artists must take on the issues that preoccupy us: racial and political strife, shifting notions of sexual identity, the inexorable march of technology. For most of them, the response is a call to resist the tides of distraction and to zero in on matters of great importance. Ocean offers an R.I.P. to Trayvon Martin, and he styles the album’s title as both “Blond” and “Blonde,” perhaps in a gentle nod to gender fluidity; he also includes a wistful spoken-word tale of a man whose relationship was ruined by Facebook. But Ocean refuses to dwell on any of it—instead of dismissing distraction he surrenders to it, content to discover the ambient beauty that comes from grazing all of life’s surfaces. ♦