Frank Ocean Worked on Latest Album at Abbey Road, Reveals Collaborator

Frank Ocean‘s long-awaited new album is scheduled to drop this July, but there haven’t been many details disclosed about the highly anticipated release. 

Recently, one of his collaborators on the project — French pianist Christophe Chassol — spoke to the BBC’s Gilles Peterson and revealed that Ocean recorded at least part of his album at the famed Abbey Road Studios in the U.K.

“Ocean invited me to Abbey Road to record on his album. I asked him how he heard about me. He told me his friend Diplo was listening a lot to [my album] Indiamore, and they started to listen to it, and they were wondering how I was doing the speech harmonization, so he called me. He asked me to do some speech harmonization on a song with him,” Chassol told Peterson. “After a while, it was cool and he was like, ‘Yeah, but we have to find another way because you already did it.’ ”

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Super-producer Rick Rubin also joined them in the studio for what were fairly luxurious, mind-bending sessions. “We start to work on a track and he says, ‘This track is this’ — that car that you can see,” Chassol said. “He makes me work on a song, and I’m like, ‘Oh, this sounds like Pino Donaggio‘s score for Blow Out by Brian De Palma.’ I start to work on a song and five minutes later on the Pro Tools screen you have the movie, the score, stretched to fit the song — just to try. I’ve never worked with that much money in music. It’s good sometimes to have money, because you can try things.”

Chassol’s main conclusion from working with Ocean? “The guy is smart. He’s really smart.”

Listen to the full interview at BBC.

This article originally appeared on Billboard.com.