Tyler, the Creator’s ninth album purchased a if fact be told contemporary enormous unveiling. Bustle-released two days after its existence became as soon as offered, it had been trailed by the looks of cryptic artwork installations at the rapper’s are dwelling exhibits – he’s unruffled theoretically touring his closing album, 2024’s Chromakopia – and at One World Alternate Heart in Fresh York, and by a flurry of online gossip: one US web feature became as soon as forced to retract and apologise for publishing a tracklisting, total with guest appearance by Kendrick Lamar, that turned out to be faux.

Despite all this, Tyler Okonma seemed eager to deflate the extra or less anticipation that arises when your closing three albums have all been critically lauded, platinum-promoting chart-toppers stout of broad tips. “Y’all better rating them expectations and hopes down,” he posted on X, “this ain’t no theory nothing.” He then published an essay that learn suspiciously love an explanation of the album’s theory, bemoaning the intrusion of cameraphones and social media on our capacity to are dwelling within the second: “Our human spirit purchased killed on fable of of the fright of being a meme.”

So what’s Don’t Tap the Glass? A moral prepare-up to Chromakopia or an interstitial launch? A random different of songs with out a overarching theme, or one thing made with extra deliberate intent? The reply appears to be like: all this stuff. It lasts less than half of an hour, and is noticeably, if no longer entirely, lacking the soul-looking out that helped elaborate its predecessor. The lyrics tend to stick to braggadocio and reaffirmations of the nihilistic persona Tyler inhabited within the times when he became as soon as deemed the kind of chance to the nation’s morals that anti-terrorism legistation became as soon as invoked to ban him from the UK: the essential, but removed from closing, mention of him no longer giving a fuck about anything arrives less than 30 seconds into the album. There are numerous memorable one-liners, among which “I don’t have confidence white contributors with dreadlocks” and his dismissal of an aging rival stand out: “49, unruffled within the avenue / Your prostate examination in per week.”

It additionally eschews Chromakopia’s kaleidoscopic musical formulation, its unexpected leaps from Seaside Boys solidarity to Zamrock samples to guest spots from Lola Younger and Lil Wayne. It’s unruffled eclectic in its different of supply field cloth – opener Sizable Poe samples Busta Rhymes and a 2015 collaborative album made by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, Shye Ben Tzur and India’s Rajasthan Say – but sooner or later feels extra narrow and focused. Just about all of its 10 tracks seem fixated on the dancefloor. There are 808 beats, Kraftwerk-y electronics, a noticeable smattering of Zapp-love vocoder and electro, among other early 80s genres. Powered by a bassline that’s a insensible ringer for that of Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and decorated with washes of synthetic strings and a falsetto vocal, Ring Ring Ring feels love a misplaced Leroy Burgess boogie manufacturing from the identical technology. The mammoth, distorted breakbeat of Sizable Poe recalls the rhythms produced by the Bomb Squad in their top, amplified by the stentorian, Chuck D-love tone of Pharrell Williams’s guest rap. In thoroughly different locations, I’ll Clutch Care of You abruptly transforms from a beatless digital ballad into one thing that – with its clattering rhythm and soiled sub-bass – most closely resembles extinct skool UK hardcore rave: in a handsome little bit of self-referentiality, the clattering rhythm is if fact be told repurposed from the title song of Tyler’s 2015 album Cherry Bomb.

All of this is completed superbly neatly. The musical reference gains are deployed with an evident be pleased and determining of the provision field cloth, in no blueprint feeling love field-ticking or pastiche; the hooks work with enviable effectivity. It’s all funky ample that you imagine even the selfie-obsessed pocketing their phone and throwing themselves round if it came booming from some broad speakers.

But it completely’s additionally no longer the entire memoir. There are scattered moments when Don’t Tap the Glass feels of a share with, or an addendum to, Chromakopia. Within the course of the album lurks the incongruous Mommanem, thick with the grunts and gasps and feral barks that had been Chromakopia’s sonic signature. On the concluding Impart Me What It Is, Tyler drops the boasts and the IDGAF stuff in favour of precisely the heartsore self-examination that characterised his earlier album, the feelings amplified by the untutored frailty of his singing stammer: “I’m feeling love a bum … is there a visitors to my soul? I want answers … Why can’t I salvage be pleased?”

It’s an outlandish formulation to total an album that seems largely about no longer overthinking things and simply giving yourself up to the second, but, then, this is the one who as soon as rapped “I’m a fucking strolling paradox / No I’m no longer.” Fourteen years on, Tyler, the Creator clearly unruffled reserves the nice to be contradictory. When the outcomes are as moral as Don’t Tap the Glass, who can blame him?

This week Alexis listened to

Blood Orange – The Field
Now not a tune of the summer within the present dancefloor banger sense, but The Field’s Durutti Column sample, skittering beats and ethereal vocals (by Caroline Polachek and Daniel Caesar) are the wonderful soundtrack to a languid afternoon.