Frank Ocean
New music from from the upcoming Channel Orange.
Last year, Frank Ocean had about as big a year as you can have without selling an album. His Nostalgia Ultra mixtape was among my top albums of 2011 - an album of romantically troubled R&B that was as current as it was unreleaseable due to numerous unclearable samples (Don Henley threatened to sue him for the use of "Hotel California" in "American Wedding," even though the mixtape was a free download). "Swim Good" and "Novacane" were sold on iTunes, and the latter was the album's flagship song - the story of a disturbing relationship with a girl he met a Coachella ("I went to see Jigga, she went to see Z Trip") and ended with them smoking the titular anaesthetic before sex.
Ocean was known as Christopher Breaux then Lenny Breaux when he lived he New Orleans before moving to the West Coast after Katrina. There, he became the R&B component in the Odd Future collective. He wasn't with them for their skirmish with photographers at Voodoo last year, but Tyler and Left Brain were at Ocean's sold-out debut at the House of Blues last year, where he dealt with the lengthy guitar outro of the "Hotel California" sample by playing it on Guitar Hero). At the show, he also performed the hook to Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild" and Beyonce's "I Miss You," both of which he wrote.
On Tuesday, he'll finally get a proper commercial release when his new album, Channel Orange, will be released. Here's a downloadable track from the album, "Pyramids."
