We Found a Lost Frank Ocean Album.

It took a fair bit of decoding, importing and downloading, but I sit here today with a seemingly discarded Frank project: Look At Us, We’re in Love. Rumours are that this was set for release around 2020-2021, but a mix of the chaos of the pandemic and the tragic loss of brother Ryan meant the LP was shelved and left to gather cobwebs. That part isn’t too much of a puzzle - we know from the silhouette motifs on the bottom of single covers like “DHL” and “In My Room” that there was some sort of connecting ribbon between the releases, and from the unfulfilled silhouettes, we know there were around a dozen songs that constituted some sort of collection. We also know from his 2023 Coachella performance and cryptic blonded magazine murals that there was a full-length project of some description in the works - what we don’t know is pretty much a sole detail about that upcoming project. Could this be it?

One of the opening tracks on the admittedly unreliably ordered tracklist given in the file I came across, “Look At Us”, does seem to point to recency. A snippet posted by Frank in November appears on this track in full, following some Channel Orange-esque cassette tape changeover sound effects. Another curveball is flung our way at the end of the track though, with a tannoy announcement of “You’re listening… to Blonde” leaving you stuck deciding which red herring is the deliberately planted one - is this track 8 years old?

The remainder of the tracklist contains decidedly fanmade-smelling remixes of late 2010s loosies, with some muffled versions of already known tracks from the vault, including the imperious-sounding “Little Demon” (which features a truncated verse from Skepta) and “Changes”, the track that accompanied a leaked music video early last year where ROSALIA’s voice was heard, and industry friends were seen at the country manor set, including A$AP Rocky and Slowthai. Some distortion-free songs make their way into the file as well, but sound pretty unfinished and undermixed including “Feeling’s Gone” and “The Line” (these are unverified titles). The beautiful “Come on World, You Can’t Go!”, first played on Blonded Radio a couple of years ago, is perhaps the project’s shining gem.

So ultimately, we’re left with 3-4 fresh, standout tracks. A mini-EP. And they are, obviously, incandescently beautiful: “Look At Us”, “These Days”, “Coral” and “We’re in Love”. “These Days” is the punchiest of the lot, with a bold piano and a perc-drum the only instruments for most of it. Nevertheless, Frank glides on an irreverent flow, akin to his verse on Rocky’s “Purity” from 2019. The beat switch is intensely gratifying, and the beat bursts into life, transporting you straight to the pool and making you forget it’s an intensely depressing January morning outside the window. “Coral” has taken me a few listens, and I attacked it from a few angles, before realising there was a flaw in my consumption of the art, and I just let it sort of wash over me while I laid there. The more I revisit it now, the more fruit I get from it, the more images I associate with it, the more artistic choices I identify and appreciate. It flies in the face of conventional song structure, which isn’t too impressive given what we already know about Frank’s ingenuity, but it still makes for a novel and fresh listening experience.

Finally, the purported closer “We’re in Love” is a pumped-up finale from which you can draw parallels to Endless’ closer “Mitsubisi Sony” - a repeated proclamation of “I got the spirit” over an uncharacteristically jaunty acoustic guitar sounds like something you could closer to equate to Daft Punk’s Discovery than Blonde.

I’m far from the first to the party, but having this unique peek into what could be coming if and when another full-length release ever gets released has at the very least done little to inflate my pessimism. Just drop the fucking thing (I’m definitely not the first person to say that).