With listeners everywhere processing Ocean's latest creation in real time, we asked NPR Music critics Jason King and Ann Powers to share their first impressions. Jason fired the first volley; we'll update this post with Ann's reply and as their conversation (and all of ours) develops.

Jason King: Discombobulation — to be confused, or upset, or disconcerted, or pained, or to feel like you've come apart, that you're all over the place — is the word that randomly popped into my mind this morning. Feeling discombobulated is the way many of us live these days, given the crushing weight that our overdeveloped media and war industrial complexes seem to impose upon us; living in the era of Trump swagger and Syrian warfare and Ryan Lochte falsehoods and music you want to hear but can't because it's locked behind a streaming-service paywall feels jarring more often than not. In some ways, discombobulation has become the new normal; even the randomness of feeling out of sorts can work like perfect serendipity, if you look at it from another perspective.

Discombobulation is also a word that suits the unconventional, messy rollout of two of this year's most highly influential albums: Kanye West's The Life of Pablo and Rihanna's Anti. We can now add Frank Ocean's to the list of pop releases surrounded by misinformation and controlled by someone disinterested in getting with the program. Since going largely off-the-radar after his watershed 2012 studio debut Channel Orange, and teasing fans in the interim with numerous false starts and canceled deadlines, Ocean's new project, called Endless, finally dropped today. What's frustrating is that we haven't been given enough information to know if Endless is just a teaser for a more pop-oriented album that's rumored to be coming or if this is it. Indeed, Endless provokes a crisis of legibility — how to effectively read its value and meaning given the deliberate withholding of information that would help contextualize it. But context may be overrated these days.

Endless is billed as a visual album, meaning there are 18 tracks you listen to as you watch a 45-minute video (directed, executive produced and creatively directed by Ocean himself) in which the singer engages in some sort of unexplained power-tools construction project. If I were feeling especially generous I'd say the black-and-white video is wonderfully Warhol-esque in its pursuit of anti-narrative, but I can't help think that it's really painfully slow, visually inert and much less stimulating than Beyoncé's highly considered Lemonade. Far more compelling is Frank Ocean's new music itself, featuring buzzy-hip collaborators like Jazmine Sullivan, Sampha and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. The music and sonics of Endless are hydra-like, featuring a surfeit of creative ideas: The whole affair can be dark, moody, drifty, ambient, textured, druggy, somnambulant, melancholic, Eno-ghostly, synthy and depressive. It can be melodically rich, even if its lethargic sameness can sometimes be snoozy.

But the ADD way that Endless' songs and interludes change, move, shift and blend and bleed into each other, as Frank himself moves between languorous singing and draggy rapping, makes the hyperactive scrawl aesthetic Dev Hynes/Blood Orange recently explored on this year's Freetown Sound album seem comparatively straight ahead and conventional. Standout lyrics like "How come the ecstasy always depresses me?" on Arca-assisted interlude "Mine" and Ocean's ranty, freestyle-type delivery on "U-N-I-T-Y" are among the album's most artistically impressive moments.

Still, after the first few listens, I'm not particularly sure what Endless adds up to or if it's even supposed to gel at all. It's like having only one corner section of a jigsaw puzzle — it just so happens to be a musically gorgeous one. Keeping fans in the dark and teasing them only with eccentric, confounding parts of a larger whole is certainly one way to hijack their short-span attention. And if it's too early for my definitive critique of a 45-minute audio-visual project that probably needs more time to wash over me, props to Frank Ocean for releasing the most bizarre and artsy example of corporate-event pop ever. We all know that Ocean has collaborated with Apple as exclusive distributor of the album (at least for now), and it's more than a bit strange that he chooses to close the album with "Device Control," a Euro-disco-esque track featuring Wolfgang Tillmans chatting about a range of smartphones including ones made by Apple, Sony and Samsung. Given that it's the last track, the idea of Frank giving so much shine to Apple's competitors on an Apple-distributed project is either a curious F-you to the hand that's just fed him, or it's one blithely WTF moment in an album that seems to be full of them. So double props to Frank for introducing a potentially discombobulating, disruptive moment to the usually unassailable Apple. Ann, I'd be curious to know your initial impressions of the album.