Frank Ocean’s New Material: Yep, He’s Still Heartbroken

Karl Walter/Getty Images Frank Ocean

Bad news for Frank Ocean, but good news for people who enjoy the lovelorn sounds of Frank Ocean: Our dude premiered three new tracks at a show in Munich on Tuesday night, and he sounds as — evocatively! Elegantly! Transcendentally! — bummed as ever. Let’s just say you could totally see John Mayer jamming out to these ones.

Ocean’s kicking off a 14-date international tour in Copenhagen on Thursday, and so apparently this was a warm-up gig. Now if he’s unleashing all this juicy new stuff in the warm-up gigs, you’re thinking, we might just have a full new album by next Tuesday. More likely, of course, is that Ocean’s just kind of tossing some stuff out there. While he has said he’s working on a new album — at the Grammys, he told Billboard he was “knee-deep in the next record” — he’s also made it clear there’s no timetable for a release. And with this tour, plus whatever else the life of an international groundbreaking R&B superstar entails, there’s no reason to think we’ll be getting official cuts any time soon. So: Enjoy the weirdly clear handheld footage here, then stash these away in your Frank Ocean B-sides folder, just in case. I mean, what if — God forbids — he finds “the one”? Let’s enjoy the perfectly sad Frank Ocean while we still can.

Filed Under: Frank Ocean

Amos Barshad has written for New York Magazine, Spin, GQ, XXL, and the Arkansas Times. He is a staff writer for Grantland.

Archive @ AmosBarshad