Frank Ocean has not been heard from for years, but the R&B icon decided to make good on a social media exchange from 2023.

Frank Ocean is the most elusive artist in music. Others have paved the way before him, but the R&B singer has held the title for most enigmatic for a decade. He hasn’t dropped an album since 2016, and has shown no signs of releasing new songs since 2020. Yes, it’s been that long. All the years between then and now went out the window on Friday, however. Frank Ocean dropped a brand new snippet on social media, and fans are completely beside themselves as a result. Some have even claimed Playboi Carti is responsible.

The snippet runs 35 seconds, and is accompanied by a surreal video. It’s difficult to determine what goes on in the video, outside of chronicle men going swimming. The new snippet picks up where Frank Ocean’s latest batch of singles left off. There’s an acoustic element to the song, and a section that can best be described as borderline spoken word, before it transitions to more traditional singing. It’s a song that aches with contemplation and regret, which are words that be used to tidily summarize Ocean’s two 2016 releases, Endless and Blonde. But none of this will surprise you. What will is the theory that Playboi Carti somehow forced Ocean’s hand.

Playboi Carti Frank Ocean Story

Over a year later and we finally got that new Frank Ocean snippet 😭 https://t.co/adsmNkIIEe pic.twitter.com/C6CuwfcybY

— Kurrco (@Kurrco) March 14, 2025

A screenshot of a DM went viral following the release of Playboi Carti’s album MUSIC. It’s an album that fans have been waiting half a decade to hear, and was responsible for brandishing Carti’s own reputation for being enigmatic. He was giving Frank Ocean a run for his money for a while. He finally dropped, and a year ago, he slid into Ocean’s DMs with a hilarious proposition. Playboi Carti basically asked the R&B star to drop a song snippet once he releases MUSIC. “Twin,” he wrote. “Post a snippet or sum if it’s up den its up?.” The friendly spirit of competition was hammered home when the rapper added, “Wat? U scared?.”

It might seem rich, the notion of Playboi Carti goading Frank Ocean into dropping when it took him such a long time to drop. That said, the gambit seems to have worked. The Instagram DM was shared by Carti in December 2023. Over a year later, and Ocean, for no explicit reason, came out of hiding and deliver on Carti’s challenge. Ocean and Carti have worked together before, on the 2017 posse cut “RAF,” but it appears they keep tabs on each other’s careers. Maybe an Ocean album is in the near future?