DHL (not the shipping company)
Last
week Frank Ocean performed at a club and released basically 3 new songs. He had
released something like 3 singles in 2017 and appeared on a few albums but not
much has been heard since he released Blonde and Endless back in 2016. I'm
pretty pumped for a new album because blonde and endless are probably two of my
favorite albums, Channel Orange is good, but it doesn’t reach the emotional
peaks of Blonde or Endless and doesn’t have the same level of innovation and
avant-garde structure of his most recent releases. He released formally one
song, DHL, and at the club event, there were a few remixes of two other
possible songs, Dear April, and Cayendo.
Either
way, almost any update from Frank is nice. In 2016 he finished his contract
with Def Jam by releasing Endless and then one day later he released Blonde
under his own label boys don’t cry. Because he now has no oversight, he can
make art at his own pace and isn’t on any schedule. This is great for him, it
means he can live his own life and make his own art and I'm very happy for him.
However, Frank doesn’t live a really public life like most celebrities and
keeps to himself only updating with cryptic updates to his website and like one
Instagram posts a month which are almost exclusively some artsy photos.
On his Instagram about a
year ago, he posted a video with like 5 seconds of the song that is now DHL, in
DHL he makes references to “old files just turned 2” so I guess he has just
been sitting on this music for a few years now? I mean I’d rather he tweaks his
music and makes the best version he can or the version he is happiest with than
rush it but like I need that album soon I swear.
The problem is I’m not even sure that there is going
to be an album. DHL was released with an album cover that had 13 silhouettes in
the corner with one of them bolded. That silhouette is a low-quality recreation
of the album cover. So, there is a 13 track album then right? Well, I hope, but
DHL would be the 4th track in an album? It makes tons of meta-references to
franks process of music, like how he is sitting on music. In reality, it seems
much more like a single than an actual album, but I really hope it's an album.
A new frank release would be sick because it's been over 1100 days since his
last full-length project, so we are quite overdue. Oh yeah, this is a song that
makes me happy btw if you didn't get it that's the prompt.
I completely agree with you, Grant. Endless and Blonde are two of my favorite albums as well and I would love for Frank Ocean to release more music. While I really like Frank's music, I didn't know all the details about his process and his instagram posts. Learning this made me want to go check out his Insta and see what he's up to.
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