The video for “Nikes,” the first track on Frank Ocean’s highly anticipated sophomore effort Blonde, includes a striking reference to the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult. The San Diego-based sect believed that an alien spaceship traveling behind the Hale-Bopp comet would pick them up if they committed mass suicide.

On March 26, 1997, thirty-nine members of the group were discovered dead after their leader persuaded them to take phenobarbital (a powerful sedative used to treat seizures) mixed with apple sauce and vodka. They were found in the bunkbeds of their compound covered in purple sheets and each wearing sweatsuits and a brand new pair of Nike Decade sneakers:

They also wore armbands that read “Heaven’s Gate Away Team.” This macabre combination of apocalyptic belief and California-casual sportswear briefly captured the late ‘90s popular imagination as the turn of the millennium loomed.

Clearly Frank Ocean never forgot. Right around the 2:13 mark of the “Nikes” video, Frank can be seen lying among some thoroughly partied-out debauchees on a cot with a purple sheet on him sporting the same Nikes that Heaven’s Gate wore. The Heaven’s Gate reference adds a particularly strong comment to a song that already takes a swipe at consumerism, making an implicit comparison between a suicidal cult’s ideology and a life of vain pleasure seeking.

It’s also worth noting that the founder of Heaven’s Gate, Marshall Herff Applewhite, is believed to have struggled with his sexual attraction to other men after growing up in the household of a strict Prebysterian minister. Applewhite even sought, and ultimately received, surgical castration to deal with his sexual impulses.

This is not the first time Frank has used death cults as a metaphor. On Channel Orange, the song “Bad Religion” alludes to the Jonestown mass suicide in reference to unrequited love:

In 1978, more than 900 followers of the charismatic reverend Jim Jones drank cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at their leader’s behest, giving rise to the expression “drinking the Kool-Aid.”

It seems almost natural that suicidal cults would capture the imagination of an artist like Ocean, who has a tortured relation to his own fame and the surrounding culture that feeds into it. Frank is clearly also fascinated—and troubled—by the intensity of religious experience and its possible perversion.

After the Orlando shooting, he wrote on his Tumblr:

We are all God’s children, I heard. I left my siblings out of it and spoke with my maker directly and I think he sounds a lot like myself. If I being myself were more awesome at being detached from my own story in a way I being myself never could be. I wanna know what others hear, I’m scared to know but I wanna know what everyone hears when they talk to God. Do the insane hear the voice distorted? Do the indoctrinated hear another voice entirely?

As a believer, Frank’s trying to square his personal faith with others' experience of a divine voice, which can be used to justify violence. The voice of Frank’s God seems to be his own conscience and his own best self, but he wonders whether “the indoctrinated,” like someone in a cult, might hear someone else’s voice as the ultimate authority. Frank clearly differentiates his own type of intimate, humane religious devotion from blind, unthinking ideologies of fanatics—bad religion.

You can read all the lyrics to Frank Ocean’s Blonde on Genius now.