The lead-up to Frank Ocean’s culture-shifting debut album, which included the seemingly out-of-nowhere 2011 mixtape Nostalgia, Ultra, was mired in mystery: Who was this elusive, vintage-car-obsessed crooner, and why was he a member of the rambunctious, uncouth youth movement known as Odd Future? Why wasn’t he signed to a record label—or was he? And how had we never heard of the inventive songwriter behind singles for Brandy, Bieber, and Beyoncé? By the summer of 2012, all had been revealed: through the popularity of Nostalgia, Ultra, Ocean had forced his songwriting deal with Def Jam into a solo career, and channel ORANGE was full of laconic, literary tracks about the underbelly of Southern California life with a Didion-esque intensity and detail. “The best song wasn’t the single, but you weren’t either,” he sings iconically on “Sweet Life,” an acerbic mission statement for an album that defined a new era of laid-back—and disillusioned—R&B which positioned that B-sides are where the richest text resides. Ocean’s secret weapon was his lack of fealty to format; he disliked being categorized as an R&B singer because of its racialized history in the music industry, and also because he was so nimble across genres, experimenting with songs that could as easily be played on a Thursday night at a piano bar (“Super Rich Kids”) as during a coronation dance for prom royalty (“Forrest Gump”). His sweeping sense of song structure came to fruition on the 10-minute-long “Pyramids,” a psychedelic journey through hard techno, ambient, and guitar-riffing synth pop. And the album’s guest stars—Earl Sweatshirt, John Mayer, André 3000—were emblematic of how well his artistry was regarded leading up to his first official album. Though it may sound compact in relation to the work he’d go on to release, Ocean’s ambitious songwriting set his place as a massive influence on music across genres—pop, hip-hop, and, yes, R&B too.