Endless

Endless is a visual album by Frank Ocean, released on August 19, 2016, as an exclusive streaming-only video on Apple Music, and preceded the August 20 release of Ocean's second studio album Blonde. Endless was later remastered and had a limited reissue in physical audio and visual formats on April 10, 2018.

The album followed what was roughly four years of silence from Ocean, who won a Grammy award for his debut album Channel ORANGE (2012).

Background
Two songs preceded the release of Endless. They were "Memrise" and "You Are Luhh," both posted on his Tumblr page in November 2014 and January 2015, respectively. The latter was updated and became the first Frank Ocean track on the album.

On April 7, 2015, Frank announced on his Tumblr that he would have the first issue of a magazine and his third album released in July of that year. That self-imposed deadline was missed. At this point, fans believed the next album would be titled Boys Don't Cry based on Ocean's posts.

A live video hosted by Apple Music went up on his website boysdontcry.co and went on for days with Ocean "woodworking and sporadically playing instrumentals on loop." Over time, the instrumentals got more layered and complex until the finished version was released on Apple Music on August 19, 2016.

The album ended up being his final album with Def Jam Recordings, fulfilling his recording contract and enabling him to release his critically-acclaimed album Blonde independently just a day later. This maneuver allowed him to basically keep all the revenue from Blonde without the interference of a record label.

Following release, there was some confusion as to which tracks were which. Before the album was released on certain formats for a limited time, fans were left on their own to guess which songs were which based on a track list found at the end of the music video. "Mitsubishi Sony" wasn't included in the credits, so fans mislabeled that song as "Higgs" and thus misidentified some songs preceding that as well. Fans also labeled the Jazzmine Sullivan and Frank Ocean track "In Here Somewhere" as being its own track but some releases have the title assigned to the instrumental that played afterwards.

Track listing
The exact names of each track vary between release formats. Tracklist adapted from Wikipedia :


 * 1) Device Control
 * 2) (At Your Best) You Are Love
 * 3) Alabama
 * 4) Mine
 * 5) U-N-I-T-Y
 * 6) Ambience 001: A Certain Way
 * 7) Comme des Garçons
 * 8) Xenons
 * 9) Ambience 002: Honey Baby
 * 10) Wither
 * 11) Hublots
 * 12) In Here Somewhere
 * 13) Slide on Me
 * 14) Sideways
 * 15) Florida
 * 16) Impietas / Deathwish (ASR)
 * 17) Rushes
 * 18) Rushes To
 * 19) Higgs
 * 20) Mitsubishi Sony
 * 21) Device Control (Reprise)

Naming differences
There are differences in track names between each version of the album:


 * There are some discrepancies between various track listings of the album. Not all releases list the songs "Ambience 001: A Certain Way", "Xenons", "Ambience 002: Honey Baby", "Walk Away", "Impietas", "Mitsubishi Sony", and the reprise of "Device Control" in their track lists
 * "Comme des Garçons" is labeled as "Comme des Garcons" in video releases
 * "Mitsubishi Sony" is stylized as "Mitsu-Sony" in the VHS/DVD releases

Release differences
Vinyl, CD/DVD, and VHS versions have some slight alterations made to them:


 * "Device Control" and its reprise are not included.
 * Rita Zebdi says "Comme Des Garçons" once at the end of the track with the same name.
 * "Mitsubishi Sony" has an extended outro.

Unreleased
The livestream that ran from the start of August up until release contained a vast number of instrumentals, some of which are "early" or "stripped down" versions of the songs listed above. There were also some tracks that never saw release outside of the livestream:


 * "Mitsubishi Sony" with extended lyrics
 * Various orchestral pieces

Though the song is listed as part of Blonde in the Boys Don't Cry magazine, the unreleased track "Easy" contains the lines "I know you're in here somewhere, you came with someone," which is used in the song "In Here Somewhere." Apart from these lyrics, "Easy" is mostly different and thus is considered a different track.

Release history
As of January 2022, the album is only officially available as a long music video on Apple Music. The album has official CD/DVD, vinyl, and VHS releases, but only a small quantity was made available on Ocean's website.

There are also differences between each version in terms of track naming. For example, "Mitsubishi Sony" is stylized as "Mitsu-Sony" on VHS/DVD releases.

Release history adapted from Wikipedia: