This morning, Frank Ocean—singer, songwriter, and excellent Tumblr-dispatcher—unveiled a new, Apple Music-produced video stream on his official website, boysdontcry.co. According to the URL, the video is titled "Champaign," and in a now-deleted Instagram post, director Francisco Soriano reportedly took credit for directing the "art project," which consists of a black-and-white feed from what appears to be a giant industrial studio. Inside, a lone figure (possibly Ocean?) is hard at work, moving and sawing large planks of wood, all in an effort to make ... well, we don't actually know. (Maybe some giant pyramids? Or perhaps a shopping cart for his buddy Tyler, the Creator? Or maybe some stairs, as this tweet from March suggests?) During intervals, you can hear big, gorgeous swells of synthesizers and orchestral notes, or what sounds like looped, distorted vocals. But it's mostly just a lot of sawing—maybe as part of a loop, maybe in real time (the video's URL also includes the word "live," but it's not clear if this is, in fact, a livestream).
What most fans were hoping to get out of today's video, of course, is news about Ocean's long-in-the-works, long-overdue new album. Last month, he posted a picture of a library return-date slip on boysdontcry, a clue that either pointed to a July or November release date, depending on how you interpreted it. So what date can we derive from this latest mysterious dispatch? Given his penchant for cryptic missives, let's look at the clues in this new footage:
- In the video, the figure sAWs with GUSTo. That can only mean one month: AW GUST, or August.
- "Bandsaw" is an an anagram for "Abs Dawn." There were only 2 lead actors in The Twilight Saga: Break Dawn films with excellent abs (Kellan Lutz and Taylor Lautner).
- The oldest tree in the world is approximately 5,065 years old.
In conclusion: Frank Ocean's next album—maybe titled Champaign, maybe titled Perfect Timber—will be released August 2, 5065. See you then!
