I find it interesting, and a little bit telling regarding Odd Future as a whole, that the best songs on Nostalgia, Ultra are largely based off other people’s songs (“Strawberry Swing,” “American Wedding,” “Nature Feels”). For all their hype, there is really very little in the Odd Future crew that hasn’t been done before. It’s even more fascinating, then, that the most “unoriginal” (given the overabundance of midtempo R&B crooners in the Drake age) member of their crew has made the best album of all of them. Nostalgia, Ultra mixes modern and retro seamlessly, from its occasionally misogynistic lyrics to its cassette-break interludes named after ’90s video games. But there’s feeling here, and talent; for all the Auto-Tune, it’s obvious Ocean can sing. It’s the only kind of record in the Odd Future collective that can bounce from Radiohead to The-Dream as easily as it does and still sound so fresh, so real. With Odd Future, one can often get the sense that a lot of what they do is a bit fraudulent, a self-built image (who isn’t guilty of this in hip-hop?). With Ocean, it never sounds contrived. And, hey, “Strawberry Swing” nearly shits all over anything Coldplay has done.

Frank Ocean – “Strawberry Swing”