Fans have been desperately anticipating Frank Ocean’s follow up to his debut album Channel Orange, which was released in 2012. This year in particular there has been much talk of whether or not the album is coming soon; this has been fuelled by artists such as Chance the Rapper, who has called the work “amazing,” and James Blake, who has said that he has heard the album and that it is “better” than his debut. Fans and the media were also convinced that the project, which is called Boys Don’t Cry, was to be released last month due to Frank’s Boys Don’t Cry website showing a picture of a library stamp card with multiple dates stamped under “date due.” The stamps begin at July 2015 and there is a stamp for every month up to July 20 16. The website also features a photo of Frank with piles of magazines that read Boys Don’t Cry, with the hashtags #ISSUE1, #ALBUM3, #JULY2015 and #BOYSDON’TCRY.
Although there’s much speculation surrounding the continued delay of the album, as well as his other projects, Frank himself did state his plans for the future in an interview with the New York Times in 2013. The singer said he was going to write “in remote locations for the next two years,” and that he had “started writing [a] book,” which is “fiction, and it’s about brothers.” With many false reports coming out over the years of the release of these projects, we are all left guessing about what we’ll get first and when. Writing a novel, as well as creating a magazine, is a reasonable excuse for the delay, and the one thing we can be sure of is that when the Boys Don’t Cry projects are finally allowed into the world, it will have been worth the wait.