Wandering Eye

Four years ago, we heard Frank Ocean fretting in the back of a taxi, begging the driver to lend an ear. “Taxi-driver / Be my shrink for the hour / Leave the meter running,” he sang, on “Bad Religion,” from “channel ORANGE.” “It’s rush hour, so take the streets if you wanna / Just outrun the demons, could you?” Now Ocean has turned to flashier vehicles to help him outrun those demons. During the week that he released his new project, after years of delays, he was filmed street-racing sports cars in Los Angeles with the rappers A$AP Rocky and Tyler, the Creator. His long-standing fascination with cars is a focal point of Ocean’s ambitiously subdued new work, which has three parts: a forty-five-minute black-and-white video, titled “Endless,” in which Ocean builds a wooden spiral staircase, set to gauzy, lo-fi music; a hefty magazine called Boys Don’t Cry, distributed at pop-up shops in four cities; and an album—in the loosest sense of the word—called “Blonde.”