Seeing as no projects have caught my eye so far in 2018 and I’ve just got back from one of probably thousands of long drives listening to this album, I think its time I review one of my favourites of all time; Frank Ocean’s Blonde.

For those of you who don’t know, Frank Ocean is a critically acclaimed, media reclusive R&B artist that has a funny habit of only releasing quite brilliant projects. His most recent project prior to Blonde was his debut album Channel Orange, a uniquely in-depth take on R&B music that followed up brilliantly from his well-received Nostalgia Ultra mixtape back in 2011.

After Channel Orange, Frank had acquired a cult following of fans desperate to hear more content. Instead of rushing into a whole new thing, Frank decided to take a 4 year gap out of releasing any new music in order to simply live. It’s apparent that on reflection, Frank wasn’t interested in the idea of using his popularity as a way of getting more money, in fact he completely avoided the limelight altogether.

Across this 4 year period, Frank had been quietly working on his sophomore album “Boys Don’t Cry”, an album that would later become Blonde.

I won’t lie, I was actually very late to the Frank Ocean hype. My musical interests were always so heavily tailored towards Hip Hop music growing up. Despite this, sometime before Blonde dropped, I had got pretty into Channel Orange, but for some reason never completely connected to it the way others did.

Perhaps this was due to the more poppy, mainstream sound delivered across Channel Orange. I always really appreciated what Frank had to say, and whilst the album is laced with some fantastic instrumentation and is generally fantastic I couldn’t help feel like sonically the project wasn’t 100% matching up with everything Frank aimed to convey.

Blonde however, to me, is drastically different. Within Blonde, Frank’s lyrical content touches on similar themes to that of Channel Orange. Themes such as love, loss, personal identity etc are all prominent across both projects. And don’t get me wrong, tracks within Channel Orange are wrote fantastically (I mean he did write for John Legend and Beyonce before Nostalgia Ultra..) but on Blonde, to me these feelings are so much more hard-hitting as a result of the way the album is pieced together.

To try to explain this further, there’s no suggestions of any track on Blonde tailoring to radio play, no signs of anything being over-produced or over-glamourised, it’s very different to that. Sonically, Blonde is an incredibly minimalist yet at times abstract album, and still manages to find a way to get every emotion across in an incredibly meaningful, nostalgic and relatable manor.

Take “Ivy” for example, a track that is extremely stripped back accompanied almost exclusively with a beautiful guitar riff. Based on that information alone you’d assume the song would sound more like a demo than anything, yet the innocence of this track (and others throughout the project) really enables Frank to apply his excellent storytelling abilities fluently, making every experience he shares actually mean something. This, compared to your everyday love ballad just feels a million times more authentic.

Another moment like this is in “Solo”, where again the song is almost entirely made up of organ chords, coupled with Frank expressing many elements of loneliness in a way that I feel connects on such a human level. It’s the songs like these on this album that really remind me that less can be more in production, so long as the message behind the track compliments.

Its not just the stripped back, simple tracks that make this album such a masterpiece either. Songs like “Self Control” start fairly minimalist, yet the 2nd half of the song transitions into a vibrant, production-filled harmonising outro expressing his desire to see his ex for the last time during summertime.

Its really hard to explain, but I feel like artists expressing emotions and experiences such as these have the ability to give so much more significance to their feelings when the sonics are tailored to how humans actually feel. Whilst there’s a mass of great artists out there today, I’ve never listened to anything that I think brings that idea to life better than Blonde.

In addition, as I mentioned earlier, another feature of this project that further increases my interest with this project are its little abstract tendencies. For example, songs like Nikes’ predominant use of pitched up vocals throughout the song.

At first, “Nikes” wasn’t really a track I’d play a lot from the album. As time went of however, something started to really attract me to how different it was. In a way I always thought it would sound great at Frank’s normal pitch, yet with more and more listens something started to interest me about hearing the narrative pitched up. To me, it feels like Frank is trying to share his opinions from another perspective, and this idea has always made the opening track weirdly more intriguing to me.

I also love how he uses these vocals to portray two conversations in “Self Control”, firstly opening with the pitched vocals, only to use them again solely as the 1st chorus whilst the 2nd chorus is a harmony of both the vocals pitched up and Frank’s regular voice. This gives a sense of real intimacy between two people without the need of a feature, something I genuinely have never seen excecuted on a solo track before.

And then there’s “Nights”.. In this track, everything I’ve mentioned about other tracks comes together into 5 minutes and 7 seconds of precision, risk-taking, beautiful vocal, pitched vocals, beat switches, incredible production, minimalism, you name it. I think this has to go down as one of my top 5 songs of all time, and definitely my favourite off of Blonde.

There’s so many more tracks I could talk about from this project, from the Warm “Pink & White” to the beautiful story told on “Seigfried”, this album really captures a series emotions in ways that are both personal to the artist, and the listener. There’s no surprise it receives the reviews it does, and I can’t wait to see what he does next. 9.5/10