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Tyler, the Creator’s ninth album received a very contemporary grand unveiling. Rush-released two days after its existence was announced, it had been trailed by the appearance of cryptic art installations at the rapper’s live shows – he’s still theoretically touring his last album, 2024’s Chromakopia – and at One World Trade Center in New York, and by a flurry of online gossip: one US website was forced to retract and apologise for publishing a tracklisting, complete with guest appearance by Kendrick Lamar, that turned out to be fake.
Despite all this, Tyler Okonma seemed keen to deflate the kind of anticipation that arises when your last three albums have all been critically lauded, platinum-selling chart-toppers full of big ideas. “Y’all better get them expectations and hopes down,” he posted on X, “this ain’t no concept nothing.” He then published an essay that read suspiciously like an explanation of the album’s concept, bemoaning the intrusion of cameraphones and social media on our ability to live in the moment: “Our human spirit got killed because of the fear of being a meme.”
So what is Don’t Tap the Glass? A proper follow-up to Chromakopia or an interstitial release? A random selection of songs with no overarching theme, or something made with more deliberate intent? The answer seems to be: all these things. It lasts less than half an hour, and is noticeably, if not entirely, lacking the soul-searching that helped define its predecessor. The lyrics tend to stick to braggadocio and reaffirmations of the nihilistic persona Tyler inhabited in the days when he was deemed such a threat to the country’s morals that anti-terrorism legistation was invoked to ban him from the UK: the first, but far from last, mention of him not giving a fuck about anything arrives less than 30 seconds into the album. There are a lot of memorable one-liners, among 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 also eschews Chromakopia’s kaleidoscopic musical approach, its sudden leaps from Beach Boys harmony to Zamrock samples to guest spots from Lola Young and Lil Wayne. It’s still eclectic in its choice of source material – 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 – but ultimately feels more narrow and focused. Almost all of its 10 tracks seem fixated on the dancefloor. There are 808 beats, Kraftwerk-y electronics, a noticeable smattering of Zapp-like vocoder and electro, among other early 80s genres. Powered by a bassline that’s a dead 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 like a lost Leroy Burgess boogie production from the same era. The huge, distorted breakbeat of Big Poe recalls the rhythms produced by the Bomb Squad in their prime, amplified by the stentorian, Chuck D-like tone of Pharrell Williams’s guest rap. Elsewhere, I’ll Take Care of You unexpectedly transforms from a beatless electronic ballad into something that – with its clattering rhythm and grimy sub-bass – most closely resembles old skool UK hardcore rave: in a neat bit of self-referentiality, the clattering rhythm is actually repurposed from the title track of Tyler’s 2015 album Cherry Bomb.
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All of this is done fantastically well. The musical reference points are deployed with an evident love and understanding of the source material, never feeling like box-ticking or pastiche; the hooks work with enviable efficiency. It’s all funky enough that you imagine even the selfie-obsessed pocketing their phone and throwing themselves around if it came booming from some big speakers.
But it’s also not the whole story. There are scattered moments when Don’t Tap the Glass feels of a piece with, or an addendum to, Chromakopia. In the middle of the album lurks the incongruous Mommanem, thick with the grunts and gasps and feral barks that were Chromakopia’s sonic signature. On the concluding Tell Me What It Is, Tyler suddenly drops the boasts and the IDGAF stuff in favour of precisely the heartsore self-examination that characterised his previous album, the sentiments 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 way to end an album that seems largely about not overthinking things and simply giving yourself up to the moment, but, then, this is the man who once rapped “I’m a fucking walking paradox / No I’m not.” Fourteen years on, Tyler, the Creator clearly still reserves the right to be contradictory. When the results are as good as Don’t Tap the Glass, who can blame him?
This week Alexis listened to
Blood Orange – The Field
Not a song of the summer in the accepted dancefloor banger sense, but The Field’s Durutti Column sample, skittering beats and ethereal vocals (by Caroline Polachek and Daniel Caesar) are the perfect soundtrack to a languid afternoon.
