Ocean’s vaunted reputation has certainly influenced the discourse surrounding the album: Glowing reviews have abounded, and even most criticisms leveled at Ocean have been tempered by disclaimers. Whereas Blonde is the really, truly awesome Frank Ocean album we’ve been waiting for all these years, yet it seems to have let a lot of people down. Read our first impressions of Frank Ocean's Blonde.Įndless is fine, but its appeal was temporarily inflated by scarcity. “Forget the technical details… and commercial semantics,” began one in-depth writeup, “and remember what Endless is: a Frank Ocean album. So, with no tangible evidence that the “real” album would ever arrive, the music world rushed to embrace Endless, the drowsy mixtape and carpentry-tutorial-as-art-film Ocean released as a “visual album” last Thursday night. Reports were circulating that his official Channel Orange followup would be out over the weekend, but similar news two weeks earlier had proven false. We saw that dynamic at work with Ocean himself two days before Blonde dropped. When an artist of Ocean’s magnitude delivers new music, it’s often graded on a curve, bolstered by hysteria and brand familiarity, so that a body of work is received with rhapsodic praise by critics and fans even if it’s merely OK. ![]() ![]() Ocean’s scattered, less-is-more approach to promotion amplified the already deafening hype by several magnitudes, until the expectations for this album rose to almost unscalable heights - almost. Blonde, the official follow-up to Frank Ocean’s instant-classic debut album Channel Orange, finally made its grand debut Saturday night, putting an end to four years of feverish anticipation fueled by rumors, missed deadlines, and its author’s general absence from the public eye.
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