It’s been enigmatic, but Frank Ocean’s long-awaited album Blonde, previously expected to be called Boys Don’t Cry, has finally arrived on Apple Music and the iTunes Store.
Blonde follows the R&B singer’s “visual album” Endless, which exclusively hit Apple Music just before the weekend, and his debut studio album Channel Orange, which attracted much acclaim upon its release in 2012. The first single from Blonde, “Nikes”, arrived on Apple Music earlier this weekend.
There is, however, some confusion over the new album’s name. While the album’s cover on Apple Music and the iTunes Store spells out that title as Blond, without the ‘e’, it is referred to as Blonde in the text of the listings on these two platforms.
AppleInsider says that Apple Music will be, for the next two weeks, the only music streaming service to offer Blonde. Indeed, Apple Music’s listing for the album claims that it is available “exclusively on Apple Music”, though it is also possible to buy the album or select tracks from the iTunes Store.
Furthermore, according to The Guardian, physical copies of Blonde have been offered at pop-up stores in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and London. Reportedly, copies were being handed out for free, but some people are said to have claimed that the physical version of Blonde has “a slightly different track listing” to the digital version that can currently be streamed on Apple Music.
