Tyler, the Creator: Don’t Tap the Glass assessment – contradictions and confessions on a dancefloor | Music

Tyler, the Creator’s ninth album obtained a really modern grand unveiling. Rush-released two days after its existence was introduced, it had been trailed by the looks of cryptic artwork installations on the rapper’s stay exhibits – he’s nonetheless theoretically touring his final album, 2024’s Chromakopia – and at One World Trade Center in New York, and by a flurry of on-line gossip: one US web site was pressured to retract and apologise for publishing a tracklisting, full with visitor look by Kendrick Lamar, that turned out to be faux.

Despite all this, Tyler Okonma appeared eager to deflate the sort of anticipation that arises when your final three albums have all been critically lauded, platinum-selling chart-toppers full of huge concepts. “Y’all better get them expectations and hopes down,” he posted on X, “this ain’t no concept nothing.” He then printed an essay that learn suspiciously like an evidence of the album’s idea, bemoaning the intrusion of cameraphones and social media on our means to stay within the second: “Our human spirit got killed because of the fear of being a meme.”

So what’s Don’t Tap the Glass? A correct follow-up to Chromakopia or an interstitial launch? A random collection of songs with no overarching theme, or one thing made with extra deliberate intent? The reply appears to be: all this stuff. It lasts lower than half an hour, and is noticeably, if not fully, missing the soul-searching that helped outline its predecessor. The lyrics have a tendency to stay to braggadocio and reaffirmations of the nihilistic persona Tyler inhabited within the days when he was deemed such a menace to the nation’s morals that anti-terrorism legistation was invoked to ban him from the UK: the primary, however removed from final, point out of him not giving a fuck about something arrives lower than 30 seconds into the album. There are plenty of memorable one-liners, amongst which “I don’t trust white people with dreadlocks” and his dismissal of an ageing rival stand out: “49, still in the street / Your prostate exam in a week.”

It additionally eschews Chromakopia’s kaleidoscopic musical strategy, its sudden leaps from Beach Boys concord to Zamrock samples to visitor spots from Lola Young and Lil Wayne. It’s nonetheless eclectic in its selection of supply materials – opener Big Poe samples Busta Rhymes and a 2015 collaborative album made by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, Shye Ben Tzur and India’s Rajasthan Express – however finally feels extra slender and centered. Almost all of its 10 tracks appear fixated on the dancefloor. There are 808 beats, Kraftwerk-y electronics, a noticeable smattering of Zapp-like vocoder and electro, amongst different early 80s genres. Powered by a bassline that’s a useless ringer for that of Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and embellished with washes of artificial strings and a falsetto vocal, Ring Ring Ring looks like a misplaced Leroy Burgess boogie manufacturing from the identical period. The big, distorted breakbeat of Big Poe remembers the rhythms produced by the Bomb Squad of their prime, amplified by the stentorian, Chuck D-like tone of Pharrell Williams’s visitor rap. Elsewhere, I’ll Take Care of You unexpectedly transforms from a beatless digital ballad into one thing that – with its clattering rhythm and dirty sub-bass – most intently resembles old-fashioned UK hardcore rave: in a neat little bit of self-referentiality, the clattering rhythm is definitely repurposed from the title monitor of Tyler’s 2015 album Cherry Bomb.

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All of that is completed fantastically nicely. The musical reference factors are deployed with an evident love and understanding of the supply materials, by no means feeling like box-ticking or pastiche; the hooks work with enviable effectivity. It’s all funky sufficient that you simply think about even the selfie-obsessed pocketing their telephone and throwing themselves round if it got here booming from some massive audio system.

But it’s additionally not the entire story. There are scattered moments when Don’t Tap the Glass feels of a bit with, or an addendum to, Chromakopia. In the center of the album lurks the incongruous Mommanem, thick with the grunts and gasps and feral barks that have been Chromakopia’s sonic signature. On the concluding Tell Me What It Is, Tyler all of the sudden drops the boasts and the IDGAF stuff in favour of exactly the heartsore self-examination that characterised his earlier album, the feelings amplified by the untutored frailty of his singing voice: “I’m feeling like a bum … is there a traffic to my soul? I need answers … Why can’t I find love?”

It’s an odd strategy to finish an album that appears largely about not overthinking issues and easily giving your self up-to-the-minute, however, then, that is the person who as soon as rapped “I’m a fucking walking paradox / No I’m not.” Fourteen years on, Tyler, the Creator clearly nonetheless reserves the appropriate to be contradictory. When the outcomes are pretty much as good as Don’t Tap the Glass, who can blame him?

This week Alexis listened to

Blood Orange – The Field
Not a music of the summer time within the accepted dancefloor banger sense, however The Field’s Durutti Column pattern, skittering beats and ethereal vocals (by Caroline Polachek and Daniel Caesar) are the proper soundtrack to a languid afternoon.