Frank Ocean’s “Blue Whale”: Hear The Thoughtful Track

Everybody loves Frank Ocean because of his gorgeous falsetto — so what happens when the crooner turns to rap, with nary a note sung in that delicate voice of his? Turns out it’s still pretty good.

On “Blue Whale,” a new track Ocean posted on Tumblr last night, the “Thinkin Bout You” sensation drops the same dark images that populated his last LP Channel Orange, tempered by a refrain where he spits ad-libbed variations of a simple “life goes on” refrain. Listen to the full song after the jump.

Frank Ocean — “Blue Whale”

Even though “Blue Whale” departs stylistically from Ocean’s typical genre, he works as well as a pseudo-Earl Sweatshirt rapper type as he does a vocalist. His rhymes are witty and fresh when he alludes to his sexuality (“I wasn’t much into the type that my bros liked, so I never really had no wife/And that’s alright”). But even when he goes for the easier joke (“If I ever have a daughter, I wonder what I could call her / Nine months after I fuck on the beach, I guess I call her karma”), he imbues it with enough subtlety that it works.

Ocean posted no information about the track alongside the audio, so we’ll wait to see whether it’s planned for an upcoming release or just something he decided to share with his fans.

What do you think of Ocean’s new track? Tell us what you thought of it in the comments below, or on Facebook and Twitter.