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Michael Andor Brodeur | @Large

Frank Ocean continues the liberation of the album

Frank Ocean (pictured performing in New York in 2012) released a massive drop of multimedia last week.Karsten Moran/New York Times/File

About two years ago, I ripped all of my CDs to a hard drive in preparation for a cross-country move. It took about two weeks. And over the time it took to strip my CD collection of its CDs (only for the collection to vaporize completely a few months later), I got to thinking about the album itself: its fate as a format, its future as a form.

At the time, streaming services like Spotify were only just starting to surge (Tidal would arrive in April 2015, and Apple Music would launch in June), but the digital download economy had already scattered the sanctity of the album through millions and millions of single servings. Meanwhile, a growing number of artists, big and small, were finding ways to operate outside of industry standards — including the industry itself. What forces would keep the album as we knew it afloat?

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“While the music industry figures out how to make access as cost-effective as ownership, how to make mere products seem more like full-blown experiences, and how to make itself appear vital when any artist can be her own distribution channel, the album stands by, awaiting the verdict on whether it has a future as a fundamental form,” I wrote — brazenly underestimating Beyoncé.

The years in between have taught me a thing or two about the resilience of the album — and that doesn’t necessarily equal stubbornness. Part of how the album has survived (and lately thrived) despite inhospitable conditions is by adapting (and sometimes defying) the form we’ve assigned it for so long.

Take Beyoncé, whose 2013 self-titled release made waves for the thump of its unannounced digital drop, but also for its defiant duality: It existed both as a stack of new tracks and as a “visual album.” More recently, her 2016 follow-up, “Lemonade,” took a similar tack, emerging as a long-form video piece on HBO simultaneous with its release as a stream of songs on (the partially Bey-owned) Tidal.

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Or Kanye West, who premiered his most recent, “The Life of Pablo,” as backing music to a fashion show in February, posted it as a stream to Tidal, and continued making alterations to the fabric of the music well after its release — furtively fulfilling a tweeted promise to maintain the mutability of “Wolves” (as “Pablo” was then titled), calling it “a living breathing changing creative expression.”

Or behold Frank Ocean, who just this weekend ended the prolonged tease of an album long rumored to be titled “Boys Don’t Cry” (the follow-up to his 2012 debut, “Channel Orange”) with what can only be described as a new body of work.

A rundown: Friday on Apple Music, Ocean released “Endless” —  a “visual album” that documents an elaborate carpentry project (previously only seen in pieces as a sporadic series of mysterious livestreams posted to Ocean’s site), and features 18 new tracks and a laundry list of contributors, from vocalists Jazmine Sullivan and Sampha to visual artists Tom Sachs and Wolfgang Tillmans. Early on Saturday, he dropped a surprise (NSFW) video for a powerful single titled “Nikes.” Later that afternoon, another 17-track album titled “Blonde” appeared on Apple Music, as well as packaged within a September-issue-size magazine of art and interviews called (finally) “Boys Don’t Cry,” made available exclusively through pop-up shops in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and London.

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This massive drop of multimedia sent Ocean fans spinning into their weekends, exploring and poring over each new element, sorting out how (and if) they connect or intersect, combing through photos and poems and long lists of collaborators crisscrossing through the projects. Are “Boys Don’t Cry,” “Endless,” and “Blonde”/“Blond” (two different versions of the album art present alternative spellings to the Apple release) each independent entities? Or is this all a single body that contains multitudes? The confusion feels like a kind of liberation.

This is especially so throughout the 45-minute monochrome meditation of “Endless,” in which we see multiple iterations of Ocean pacing around a massive workroom. The whole film is this crew of Franks hard at work sawing, painting, pacing, sweeping, texting, hammering, resting, and resuming — gradually assembling stacks of planks into piles of boxes, and stacking those boxes into a coil of steps.

Watching his spiral staircase take unsteady shape in the middle of the workshop feels like a metaphor for the album itself: Ocean’s product here is his process, and it feels like a far truer view of an artist at work than we usually get from albums.

There’s one detail that feels equally like an error: Before the songs have a chance to play all the way through, the film loops back to its beginning. It’s as though the album falls out of synch with itself — its two halves pulling away from each other, its wholeness suddenly compromised. You can feel the album ending, yet Frank and his several selves are once again just getting started. Over and over, he’s building something from nothing and letting us watch as he climbs his own creation — onward, upward, in circles, endless.

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Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.