If you’ve been on the internet in the past few days, this won’t be news to you: after four years spent in relative quiet, Frank Ocean has released not one, but two new albums. Was it ever worth the wait.

Endless, a visual album Ocean released to Apple Music, features the singer in black and white, building a spiral staircase by hand. It was an unexpected move from Ocean—while visual albums have made major headlines this year, there’s usually more recognizable narrative to follow. But the manual labor Ocean executes in the film seems to us a statement on making itself: on the sweat and tears that lie behind every artist’s craft. Behind the song we hear or the stair we climb is a body that poured soul into it.

The more traditional music release from Ocean, Blonde, has already received major accolades. And with good reason: from its earliest, haunting lyrics in “Nikes,” it’s an album that snags in your chest, demanding to be heard on repeat until its meaning can be extracted. A review from The Verge elegantly captures what we felt when we heard it for the first time. Duality, it argues, is at the core of Blonde: “Everything is at once beautiful and destructive. Decisiveness is boring; delineation is sterile.” Blonde is beautiful, and it hurts.

Both of these albums underscore Ocean’s preference for humanity over stardom. With this double-headed release, he reminds his fans of his uncanny ability to translate emotional truths into music you can feel in your bones, and at the same time, re-asserts the artist’s body toiling away behind the scenes.

If you’ve been on the internet in the past few days, this won’t be news to you: after four years spent in relative quiet, Frank Ocean has released not one, but two new albums. Was it ever worth the wait.

Endless, a visual album Ocean released to Apple Music, features the singer in black and white, building a spiral staircase by hand. It was an unexpected move from Ocean—while visual albums have made major headlines this year, there’s usually more recognizable narrative to follow. But the manual labor Ocean executes in the film seems to us a statement on making itself: on the sweat and tears that lie behind every artist’s craft. Behind the song we hear or the stair we climb is a body that poured soul into it.

The more traditional music release from Ocean, Blonde, has already received major accolades. And with good reason: from its earliest, haunting lyrics in “Nikes,” it’s an album that snags in your chest, demanding to be heard on repeat until its meaning can be extracted. A review from The Verge elegantly captures what we felt when we heard it for the first time. Duality, it argues, is at the core of Blonde: “Everything is at once beautiful and destructive. Decisiveness is boring; delineation is sterile.” Blonde is beautiful, and it hurts.

Both of these albums underscore Ocean’s preference for humanity over stardom. With this double-headed release, he reminds his fans of his uncanny ability to translate emotional truths into music you can feel in your bones, and at the same time, re-asserts the artist’s body toiling away behind the scenes.