Since that Grammy-winning record, a collection of witty, plainspoken songs about drugs, love, and the spiritual void of wealth, he has been the target of intense interest, plus a hilariously agitated online campaign to force him to hurry up and release a follow-up. But Frank Ocean is stepping, if carefully, right into this storm of huge expectations - one he helped brew with his lauded 2012 album, Channel Orange.

To whom much has been given, much is being demanded. If that sounds like a lot, a tornado of hashtags and high hopes, it is.

In April, Beyoncé used the power of her fame to super-charge Lemonade, a film and album constructed as a troubling fable about marriage, infidelity, and redemption, with allusions to the entire history of black womanhood in America. Then, in February, Kanye released The Life of Pablo, an intentionally unfinished masterpiece that he continued to update throughout the year, deconstructing the entire idea of the album. First, Rihanna, better known as a blockbuster hitmaker than an artiste, released the maddening Anti, an elusive bohemian meditation on toxic anxieties and an exercise in psychoanalytic self-reflection. Albums this year have seemed deliberately divisive, mishmashes of provocative sounds, experimental structures, creative rollouts, and identity politics. The number one question that some of music’s most of-the-moment stars seem to have asked themselves this year was a simple one: You’ve won the entire world’s attention - now what are you going to do with it? Owing to an ever increasing swirl of think pieces and social media, celebrated music in 2016 has to make the listener talk as much as dance.

Frank ocean albums split in middle