Frank Ocean's "Blonde" Turns 10: Where Everyone Was on August 20th When They Heard the Whole Album

On the night of August 20, 2016, a long line snaked outside a small shop on Mulberry Street in New York. FADER's current editor-in-chief Steffanee Wang was around number 300 in line, wearing a pair of denim shorts she'd later admit were "already too small," waiting in the muggy evening heat to grab a copy of the "Boy's Don't Cry" zine. Forty-five minutes later, the store sent everyone else home — they'd sold out. That same night, Frank Ocean released his third studio album, "Blonde." A full decade has passed since then, and he still hasn't put out a follow-up.

The making of this 17-track record was a saga in itself: Ocean spent weeks building a mysterious staircase on a livestream, then dropped the visual album "Endless" to fulfill his Def Jam contract, before finally releasing "Blonde" without warning under his own label, Boy's Don't Cry. In FADER's original review, written by Jordan Sargent, the "I" in the album mostly points directly to Ocean himself, while the "you" points to a specific someone — "Ocean pulls us in close to him while also finding a way to disappear into the crowd."

They Remember Where They Were

Ten years later, FADER gathered a group of musicians and staff members to look back on where they were and what they were doing the first time they heard "Blonde." The answers ran the gamut, but each one felt too specific to be made up. Rapper Doechii says she first heard it while making a gravity bong out of a water bottle, saying it "takes me back to a simpler time, when there was still time." Her favorite track is "Godspeed." Na-Kel Smith remembers the days he'd skate with his friend Davonte Jolly and train with an LA Galaxy coach in Torrance — his favorite is either "Futura Free" or "Ivy," though he's not entirely sure which.

Natanya watched the "Endless" livestream on her iPod touch that night, then climbed down from her bunk bed the next morning for school with her head full of questions, having stayed up all night converting the whole album from YouTube to MP3. Her favorite, "Solo," feels to her "like Virginia Woolf-style stream of consciousness — we've all felt that way before." Love Spells was still in middle school at the time, only catching "Nikes" in the gap between school and basketball practice before he had to run back to sub in — but those few minutes brought back memories of listening to "Thinkin Bout You" in his mom's Maserati as a kid, even though their living room back then didn't even have furniture.

On staff, social media editor Hajin Yoo heard the album two days before her 19th birthday, that summer when all her friends back home in Michigan were scattering in different directions. She describes listening to "Ivy," "Forrest Gump," and "Futura Free" like echoes of teenage depression. Senior writer Vivian Medithi says she wasn't a die-hard fan herself — that was her friend, who actually lined up for the "Boy's Don't Cry" zine — but "Nikes," "Siegfried," and "Futura Free" seem to be an invisible emotional thread connecting almost everyone she knows: "Maybe your song is different, maybe it's 'Ivy' or 'Nights' or 'White Ferrari,' but you definitely have a 'Blonde' song."

Deputy editor Tobias Hess's memory is the most specific and mundane of all. For him, "Blonde" became a daily ritual at the 7:10 a.m. bus stop on LA's Westside, standing there waiting for the bus, watching the city wake up track by track. He barely listens to it anymore since finishing high school — "because the second I hear it, I'm suddenly 17 again, and I don't want to be 17 again."

Steffanee Wang eventually listened to the whole album forwards and backwards, lying in bed with wired earbuds in, playing it on loop again and again. She remembers the line from "Self Control" — "Wish I was there, wish we'd grown up on the same advice." "I didn't fully understand what he was singing about back then, but I understood the feeling."

Ten years after "Blonde" was released, Frank Ocean still hasn't put out another studio album.