@Fayez Salen

Discover new music from artists we think you'll like. Refreshed every Friday.

It’s not just that he’s an enigma or that he follows his own clock. It’s not even his style (which seems invincible), or the fact that he’s one of the few pop artists publicly navigating the frontiers of queer identity. It’s that Frank Ocean is one of those songwriters who manages to touch new and distant places in his audience’s imagination, a cartographer of intimacy and confession so intrepid and sensitive that listening to him can feel like eavesdropping on something private, maybe even inexpressible. Yet here he is, expressing it. Even in his early days as the quiet one in the LA hip-hop collective Odd Future, Ocean seemed possessed by a stoicism and emotional intelligence that was uncommon, luminous—the kind of guy who sees more than he says and doesn’t waste a word when he opens his mouth. <br> Ocean was raised mostly in New Orleans, and moved to Los Angeles in the mid-2000s; by 2009, he’d landed a contract with Def Jam, but couldn’t square the relationship with his ambitions and ended up releasing his first mixtape, 2011’s <i>Nostalgia, Ultra</i>, on his own. He was soulful, funny, understated, and poetic, the kind of writer who made fragments of the real world—a girl doing porn to cover tuition (“Novacane”), a dip in the ocean (“Swim Good”)—crackle with mystical significance. <br> From Kanye, Jay-Z, and Beyoncé on down, he gained a cult of followers. In 2012, he released <i>Channel ORANGE</i>, which veered from Stevie Wonder-style soul to string-led gospel and psychedelia, framing R&B as a kind of rarified art music. The writing got sharper, too—at once more pitiless (“Crack Rock”), more expressive (“Bad Religion”), and more surreal (“Pyramids”), weaving storytelling and social commentary with an offhand brilliance that has become Ocean’s trademark sleight of hand. After a four-year period during which news of his next move flitted around in the internet ether like myth, Ocean released two projects in a week, in August 2016: the visual album <i>Endless</i> and the more conventionally framed <i>Blonde</i>. If <i>Channel ORANGE</i> had sounded like Ocean opening up, <i>Blonde</i> marked a contraction, exploring meditations and internal monologue with a sound that often felt more like ambient music than R&B. In the few years following <i>Blonde</i>, Ocean shared a string of singles through his Apple Music show, <i>blonded RADIO</i>, each one its own miniature event. Whether turning inward or outward, Ocean continues to explore.

Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar’s dense wordplay and community-minded vision has earned him both the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 (a first for a rapper) and the headline slot at the Apple Music Super Bowl LIX Halftime Show in 2025. Most people heard K-Dot for the first time on 2012’s <i>good kid, m.A.A.d city</i>, a coming-of-age concept album that nonetheless yielded multi-platinum hits like “Swimming Pools (Drank)” and “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” seven Grammy nominations and the no. 7 slot on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list. That resounding success emboldened the generational MC to explore live-band hybrids of jazz and funk on 2015’s <i>To Pimp a Butterfly</i>, all while still producing a single as accessible yet self-possessed as “King Kunta.” As for 2017’s <i>DAMN.</i>, it’s no accident that the song titles are in all caps with a full stop, from the all-time clapback “HUMBLE.” to the slow-burn Rihanna collab “LOYALTY.” With Lamar now firmly established in the culture, he was tapped to curate the soundtrack album for 2018’s <i>Black Panther</i>, giving him one of his signature tracks in “All the Stars,” a swooning pop crossover featuring his repeated creative partner SZA. He has remained dominant since then, flexing hard across multiple vocal modes on 2022’s scathing “N95” as if in training for his chart-topping 2024 diss track “Not Like Us,” powered by his ultra-public feud with one-time collaborator Drake. The same year’s “squabble up” and “tv off” reinforced both his fiery focus and talent for polyphonic delivery, slipping between voices as often as needed to hammer home his commentary on hip-hop and wider popular culture alike.