The video was revealed to be promotion for Endless, a 45-minute-long visual album that began streaming on Apple Music on August 19, 2016. That same day, many news outlets reported that August 5, 2016, could be the release date for Boys Don't Cry. On August 1, 2016, a video appeared that showed Ocean woodworking and sporadically playing instrumentals on loop. The album ends with an interview between Ocean and his brother Ryan, recorded when Ryan was 11 years old. 'Pretty Sweet' features gospel choir elements and dissonant noise. Guest vocalist André 3000 contributes a rapid rap verse on 'Solo (Reprise)' which has been described as the album's only overt guest feature.
The track 'Seigfried' interpolates a spoken word part by Elliott Smith and 'White Ferrari' borrows musical elements from the Beatles' song 'Here, There and Everywhere', while 'Close to You' incorporates a Stevie Wonder sample. The Daily Telegraph also suggested that Ocean's voice and melodies obscured the experimental nature of his compositions.
Spin magazine's Dan Weiss compared his vocal treatments to those of Prince's aborted Camille album. The Daily Telegraph noted Ocean's use of varispeed and Auto-Tune effects on his voice, while Greg Kot stated that he utilizes these audio processing devices to employ 'two distinct voices, like characters in a play, a recurring theme throughout the album'. Songs change shape subtly as they go, rarely ending in the same place they began.' Ann Powers described the album as 'equal parts psychedelic indie rock, post-IDMelectronica, post-U2 / Coldplay-esque Eno-pop, post-Drakehip hop, and post-Maxwell drifty soul / R&B,' and wrote that 'experimental, druggy sonics abound.' Nina Corcoran from Consequence of Sound described Blonde as featuring an avant-garde minimalist style similar to the work of Brian Eno, and noted that Ocean often utilizes 'acoustic and electric guitars over traditional synth and bass-heavy R&B.' The Independent wrote that 'one track bleeds languidly into another, as if we're listening to a long, stoned stream-of-consciousness,' and described the album's sound as a 'glitchy, miasmic brand of R&B.' The Quietus wrote that its form 'isn't that of a typical pop or R&B album – it tends to meander into his surreal dreamscapes, cut with jarring samples of conversation, odd effects, drifting guitars and beatless melodies that go on longer than expected.' The Daily Telegraph described its sound as 'a mellifluous concoction of shimmering melodic haze and ambient mood, almost entirely absent of anything resembling a singalong chorus or club groove.' The Observer 's Kate Mossman characterized the album as 'cerebral, non-macho, boundary-free R&B.' The Guardian tentatively likened Blonde to a collection of loose sketches and compared its 'lush and atmospheric' tracks to experimental and texture-driven albums such as Radiohead's Kid A (2000) and Big Star's Third (1974), writing that 'the tone is muted and introspective, full of spectral guitar and lacking not just hefty beats but any kind of percussion at all.' ĭiscussing its musical eclecticism, Rolling Stone wrote that 'this is an R&B album in only the most elastic and expansive sense of the term' and noted that 'minimalist rock guitar and simple electric keyboard work drive numerous songs twitchy rhythms and bizarre vocal effects creep in from the edges. Blonde features an abstract, atmospheric sound in comparison to Ocean's previous work, and utilizes a variety of unconventional musical elements.
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