Frank Ocean is a forceful songwriter, an original voice, and a man who makes albums that could only be made by him, in an age of kit-build superstars. Channel Orange topped this poll with more than three times as many votes as the record before it. What's your No 1 album of the year? Vote in our readers' poll.Blonde (alternatively titled blond) is the second studio album by American singer Frank Ocean. It was released on August 20, 2016, as a timed exclusive on the iTunes Store and Apple Music, and followed the August 19 release of Ocean's video album Endless. The album features guest vocals from André 3000, Beyoncé, and Kim Burrell, among others. Centrepiece “Alright” is now a civil rights anthem, but To Pimp a Butterfly plays less like a statement than a bad dream: conflicted introspection, vexed empathy and political irreverence meet pitch-black humour that jolts you awake, with the sense that without this music, we’d be lost.Production was handled by Ocean himself, alongside a variety of high-profile record producers, including Malay and Om'Mas Keith, who collaborated with Ocean on Channel Orange, as well as James Blake, Jon Brion, Buddy Ross, Pharrell Williams, and Rostam Batmanglij, among others.

Each contributes to this modern classic, as despairing and murky as it is lucid and fireball bright. This all collided with a resurgent jazz sensibility in rap – brass, blue notes, manic freedom, melancholy – primarily via LA beat scene luminaries Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington and Thundercat.

There was the murmur of creeping fascism, the roar of a re-energised black rights movement, and its roots in racist police shootings broadcast and protested across an infernal social media landscape. But with To Pimp a Butterfly, the Compton rapper became a cultural institution, as if summoned by the decade’s converging flash points. Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)īy 2015, Kendrick Lamar was already a grandmaster stylist.

Ranking frank ocean albums