Frank Ocean‘s resting pulse for most of his career has been elusiveness. The singer who has never followed any of the traditional music industry rules releases music, or not, on his own, often erratic schedule, typically with no advance notice and with little commentary.
Which is why it was no surprise that his latest musical missive arrived with no fanfare in his Instagram Story on Wednesday (Nov. 8) in the form of a minute-long, unnamed moody track. In audio captured here, Ocean can be heard crooning in his hazy manner over a droning keyboard, with the lyrics coming through only in brief, intelligible bits as the words often slide together in a blur.
“Way more laid back than I did when I was my younger [unintelligible]/ … assumptions but they were educated guesses/ that’s why I … trying to see all your sides/ but your heart’s been tangled in barbed wires/ If you hand it to me, I can’t handle it,” he sings. “You got boundaries, but they’re just obstacles you’re putting in between us/ Pick and choose but we both got options.”
The rest of the lyrics that appear to be about love confusion are hard to decipher, but fans were typically psyched to get anything new from Ocean, who has not issued any new music since he surprise-dropped two singles, “Dear April” and “Cayendo” in 2020, which was followed by a never-released untitled nine-minute song on the Christmas special on his Apple Music 1 Blonded Radio show in December 2021. Ocean has not released a proper album since 2016’s Blonde.
At press time no additional information was available about the song or whether it will be officially released.
Ocean once again receded from public view after his confusion, glitchy appearance at the Coachella Festival in April, which was his first public show since 2017. During the headlining set that began an hour late, Ocean didn’t perform any new songs (but did play radically reworked versions of his familiar tracks), was sometimes hard to spot on the cavernous stage and then was was cut off due to curfew, which ended the set whose livestream on the festival’s official YouTube broadcast was scrapped at the last minute.
It later emerged that Ocean reportedly performed with a serious ankle injury and that his planned elaborate stage set-up — which was to feature a giant ice rink and professional hockey players and olympic skaters doing choreography during the show — was scrapped at the 11th hour after weeks of rehearsals; Ocean later dropped out of a planned second weekend headlining slot due to the injury, costing the festival millions of dollars.
In classic Ocean fashion, he peeked back out in June with the announcement of his 48-page Mutations photo book, which a release said would be printed on “tissue-weight paper.”
