Esperanza Spalding (who Frank included on inaugural edition of blonded radio) is a great example of this, skirting the borders of jazz, funk, and soul and paying homage to each, but carving out a singular aesthetic that’s both modern and timeless.The best tracks here are those that negotiate traditional genre boundaries with a gentle grace. There’s a warmth and intimacy to many of Frank Ocean’s best tracks-think of the delicate dance of “Pink + White” from Blonde, or Channel Orange tracks like “Bad Religion,” the bouncy “Monks,” or the titantic “Thinkin’ About You.” The Rhodes-driven tracks reference, of course, the classic R&B of Stevie Wonder, but they also point towards another, more modern and gentle strand of R&B that descended from neo-soul forebearers such as Erykah Badu and D’Angelo. Further Listening: Decoding Endless: Frank’s Wild Years The Best Ambient Techno The 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time Aphex Twin’s Field Day SUNDAY-MORNING HEARTBREAK AND SOFT R&B JAMS anthem “La ritournelle” in particular-but, for the most part, the music here serves as a pensive, ambient mood board. The tracks here do occasionally gain momentum -with French maverick Sébastien Tellier’s reflective 3 a.m. It’s no surprise to see Arca here the Venezuelan queer performance artist and Kanye/Björk producer has been mining the same space between operatic melodrama and jarring ambient noise as Ocean did on Endless and the last half of Blonde. Rundgren’s other contribution to this playlist, his 1973 track “Flamingo”-sampled on Ocean’s track “Solo”-is comparatively less whispy, with chirping birth noises fluttering around a circular synth figure.

A beautiful, gentle piano melody emerges from the skittering beats of Aphex Twin’s “Flim.” Todd Rundgren’s 1970 proto-ambient work “There Are No Words,” meanwhile, moves like fog-eerie, otherworldly, and all-encompassing. This vibe was carried over to the creeping sounds of Blonde tracks “Seigfried” and “Futura Free.”This focus on textures over tunes is the common denominator for most of the tracks on this playlist. There were certainly songs there-the Isley Brothers/Aaliyah cover “(At Your Best) You Are Love” remains one of the most haunting tracks Ocean has released-but for the most part, the piece was focused on generating a skeletal, unsettling, and haunting atmosphere. With the visuals’ stark, high-contrast lighting, and the tracks’ broken soundscapes and fractured melodies, it was an immersive and frequently confounding experience. (You can access the original blonded podcast by visiting Apple Music, or subscribing to our Spotify channel, where we’re collected them as Spotify playlists.) FRANK’S AMBIENT/ELECTRONIC/GLITCH ITCHįrank Ocean’s video performance piece Endless was a teaser “album” of sorts, released just one day before Blonde. The main playlist here represents a megamix of all the tracks featured in the segmented playlists below. Listening to these broadcasts is like watching a master chef at work in their kitchen.We’ve combined and organized selections that Frank picked for blonded, as well as previous lists he’s provided over the years and the music that he’s sampled, dividing the playlists largely along genre lines in order to provide a key for how Frank thinks about music. Like many music masterminds-from Prince to Radiohead-he’s interested in genre pastiche, extracting and recontextualizing broad and seemingly disparate forms of music. Ocean has never been particularly forthcoming in interviews-on the few occasions he’s done them-but his taste in music offers a rare and deep glimpse into his creative processes and inspirations.For many, Ocean’s music is singular, and his talent and sound seem to have emerged from a vacuum, but there are specific antecedents to each component of his music. After a fit of false starts and head fakes, Ocean revealed his masterpiece, Blonde, an album that, in many ways, embodied a greater idea of what America could be: inclusive and diverse, both culturally and aesthetically adventurous and transparent, embracing experimentations in search of an emotional honesty and, not least importantly, fun, and filled with an overarching optimism.Things may have gone downhill since then, but we still have Frank, and he’s been particularly productive in 2017, releasing a slew of more pop-oriented singles, and, maybe just as importantly, curating his own radio show, blonded, on Apple Music. We may have reached a sort of peak America on August 20, 2016.

All frank ocean albums