When Frank Ocean released 'Chanel Orange', he was an up-and-coming new name on the scene, heavily affiliated with Tyler, The Creator's Odd Future collective and providing guest vocals on Kanye West and Jay-Z's joint album 'Watch The Throne'. As I stated in the beginning, this was possibly one of the biggest albums of the last few years and easily the most highly-anticipated of this year so far.

Prince of course famously changed his name to a symbol in order to get out of his contract with Warner Bros many years ago. While this isn't the first time an artist has pushed out music in order to get out of a contract with a label. But why would he do this? Because Frank Ocean knows exactly what he needed to do in order to gain musical independence. He fulfilled that quota with 'Endless', leaving 'Blonde' to be self-released through a new label he just formed. This is because Frank Ocean's contract with Def Jam stipulated that he owed them one more album before he was up for renegotiations. 'Endless', the first of the two records was released through Ocean's regular imprint Def Jam, 'Blonde' however was sent out through 'Boys Don't Cry', the original working title for the album which ended up being used as the name for an accompanying magazine for the record. When you look at which record label released these two albums, you'll notice something quite odd. But as time has moved on, it seemed Frank had an ulterior motive when it came to this plan. On the surface, people were more than ecstatic to hear not one but two new albums from one of the best new songwriters of this decade.

As it turned out 'Endless' wasn't the actual album we had been waiting for, but in fact a precursor to 'Blonde', the 'real' new Frank Ocean album. And after months of absolutely no information whatsoever, we were finally treated to 'Endless', a visual album which Ocean streamed exclusively through Apple music. Having been four years since his critically acclaimed album 'Channel Orange' dropped, the suspense in which he built his latest work was a masterclass in PR and expectation. As far as hype for a record goes, Frank Ocean managed to reach almost Daft Punk levels of buzz around his latest release.

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