Frank Ocean adds mysterious livestream to website

Yet again, Frank Ocean’s musical return appears imminent. The reclusive R&B star updated his website early Monday with an Apple Music-hosted video livestream. The black-and-white frame displays a large warehouse with two workbenches and, around 9 a.m. ET, an unidentified figure appeared in the image and began sawing wood with a table saw.

This is the first update (if you can call it that) that Ocean has provided since posting an image in early July of a library due date slip that hinted his next album, widely believed to be named Boys Don’t Cry, would come out last month.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because Ocean similarly teased a new album for July 2015, suggesting in April 2015 that he’d release Boys Don’t Cry, the follow-up to his 2012 masterpiece Channel Orange, then. That didn’t happen, and Ocean would subsequently cancel his headlining performance at August 2015’s FYF Fest.

In March, Ocean’s Channel Orange producer Malay told Pitchfork that the singer’s new album was “maybe a month away,” adding that “people are going to be pleasantly surprised, for sure.” And James Blake, whose 2016 release The Colour In Anything Ocean worked on, told EW in May that he has heard some of Ocean’s new material and that “he is going to make people very happy.”

Ocean has slowly drifted back into the public eye in 2016, appearing in a coda to “Wolves” — later renamed “Frank’s Track” — on Kanye West’s February release The Life of Pablo. The singer has also joined Calvin Klein’s fall campaign.