Frank Ocean’s first moment in the limelight came with joining LA hip-hop collective, Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All in 2009. Later that year he signed on as a solo artist with Def Jam records, a partnership that unfortunately, went sour. Since then, he has gone on to write songs for Beyonce, Kanye West, John Legend and Nas, and after considerable anticipation, released his debut mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra. The album was originally relased for free on his tumblr, and having received favourable critical attention, Def Jam and Frank Ocean have started speaking again.

Ocean earns his musical stripes with his debut – he plays with the mixtape concept (taking pre-existing songs and singing original lyrics over them) and completely re-creates songs by Coldplay, MGMT and The Eagles with an R&B flavor, and the sort of lyrical twists and turns one would expect from a member of Odd Future. Likely the most unexpected pairing on this album is in the track “American Wedding”, a re-interpretation of “Hotel California”. It’s the longest track on the album, coming in at just over seven minutes, mostly because of a lengthy guitar solo that directly references “Hotel California” but also serves a similar musical purpose to Kanye West’s guitar-like distorted vocal solo at the end of “Runaway”. Lines like “It’s an American wedding/ They don’t mean too much/ They don’t last enough/ We had an American wedding/ Now what’s mine is yours/ American divorce” and “Girl if you stay/ You’ll probably leave later anyway/ Love made in the U.S.A.” offer a bleak but welcome counter-argument to mainstream hip-hop’s take on love.

Nostalgia, Ultra’s lead single, “Novacane” was produced by Ocean’s long-time mentor and musical partner Tricky Stewart. The song features an accessible, but sonically interesting beat, and the lyrical content takes a cue from Tricky Stewarts pairing of top 40 conventions with ideas that are a little to the left. The chorus describes a “model broad with the Hollywood smile” that Ocean blames, in the verses for things like “every single record/ Auto-tuning, zero emotion, muted emotion/ Pitch corrected/ computed emotion”. It’s moments like this that make Nostalgia, Ultra particularly compelling – Ocean clearly has some problems with mainstream hip-hop and R&B that go beyond his disagreements with his own label, and there’s something gleefully bratty about using hit songs as the musical bed on which he hashes through those problems.

Other highlights on Nostalgia, Ultra include “Nature Feels”, a new take on MGMT’s “Electric Feel” describing a garden tryst with the tongue-in-cheek hook, “Tell me how my nature feels” and “Strawberry Swing”, a laid-back R&B-ified version of the Coldplay song of the same name. Overall, the album is engaging, moving from serious moments to light-hearted jabs, and Ocean shows his appreciation for not only the R&B and hip-hop world that he comes from, but also all of the artists that have subtly influenced it over the past few decades.