There was perhaps no one more highly and anxiously anticipated at Coachella this year than Frank Ocean. The 35-year-old has not released an album since Blonde, in 2016, and has not performed live in over six years. His headliner set at Coachella, originally slated for 2020, was delayed by Covid and then pushed back again. A refusenik and a renegade whose enigmatic public presence toggles between achingly tender and, more often, highly elusive, Ocean is beloved for two albums’ worth of nostalgia-tinged, genre-defying music. I encountered several people over the weekend for whom he was more or less the reason they bought tickets to the festival.
Those fans, as well as a good fraction of the festival who stayed for Ocean’s weekend-capping set on Sunday night, had their patience tested. There were warning signs of something amiss, namely the last-minute cancellation of a planned YouTube live stream for his show. The main stage screens still showed test visuals at his 10pm start time, for which people began staking out good spots an hour beforehand. By the time the show started an hour later, “Come on, Frank!” was a common refrain.
