If you don’t, well, it’s just another tape in a year in which tapes come almost every day by the dozen. This record means something, but only if you get it. It’s a masterclass in understated importance.
The lack of an official guestlist, the quick run-up to release date, the “first studio take after a demo” feel to the whole record it all hints at a messiness, a lack of pretension. This is a record that merits a deep dive, and as such, people are diving in. However, none of these artists are listed as features on the Spotify tracklist - Tyler dropped Easter eggs, but if you really want to dig into the voices behind the music, you have to do your research. The names of this album’s supporting cast are huge: We get Uzi and Playboi Carti, Solange and Kanye West. The album is a puzzle that slowly builds itself, revealing voices and ideas the more one becomes acquainted with its tics. There’s the disembodied voice of Lil Uzi Vert on opener “IGOR’S THEME,” not exactly the discernible Uzi we’re used to, just weird enough to cause a double take. With these variables - and considering Tyler is, among many other things, a master of his own hype - every move surrounding the release of IGOR makes his rise to hip-hop’s elite class of solo stars almost inevitable.įirst, there’s the guestlist - or, more accurately, the lack of one. It’s also superlatively gorgeous and mesmerizing. But here’s Tyler, the Creator gearing up for a Governor’s Ball headlining set next month, on the heels of his densest, weirdest, and messiest album to date. Flower Boy was that something - and with IGOR, he’s proven that his newfound consistency and earnestness wasn’t a fluke.įollowing up your most successful record to date with a release that doubles down on your experimental instincts isn’t necessarily the safest bet. But Tyler still brought all three of those skills to the table, and the highs of Goblin, Wolf, and Cherry Bomb hinted at something shape-shifting. And as such, with his just released IGOR, he’s at his best: a little broken, a little unburdened, entirely himself.ĭespite the somewhat up-and-down trajectory of his career, Tyler was never going to fail - he’s always been too talented. Tyler’s early records never totally outshined those of his West Coast peers (and/or Odd Future cohorts): Frank Ocean’s a better songwriter, Earl Sweatshirt’s a better rapper, Vince Staples is funnier. Tyler, the Creator defined his early presence through his contrarianism. He says it on Goblin’s first single, “Yonkers:” “I’m a fuckin’ walkin’ paradox/ No I’m not/ Threesomes with a fuckin’ triceratops.” Tyler was the opposite of whatever we said, and he seemed to feed off the conflict. The teenage troll has slowly grown, like so many of us do, into a lovesick twenty-something. Instead of using his music as a reactionary measure against his critics, he presented himself as he wished to be on Flower Boy, and we all embraced it - because Tyler is damn charming when he wants to be. Tyler hadn’t changed, he just took himself at face value. The inflammatory raps just to egg on a response disappeared, and in its place was a deeper look into the evolution of a person and artist. The album was released to near unanimous acclaim, his first album whose reception was nearly unequivocally positive, rather than divisive. With fourth official album Flower Boy in 2017, Tyler did the latter, to startling effects. It presented a fork for Tyler: Either dive deeper into his me-against-the-world mentality, or embrace a more introspective attitude towards his work, providing listeners a behind-the-scenes look into the type of person the rapper wanted to become. With Cherry Bomb, the album represented whatever you thought about Tyler: Either he was brash, offensive, and overhyped, or a DIY genius with ideas bursting at the seams - an energy too radical for cynics to understand. Then there was 2015’s Cherry Bomb, two years after that, which was a Rorschach test for Tyler fans. It’s a record that didn’t display an expanded palette as much as reiterate what Tyler did best - gorgeous beats, searing attacks on enemies, and struggles with celebrity. Wolf trod much the same territory as its predecessor and found Tyler doubling down on his outlandishness almost as a defense mechanism. Goblin’s 2013 follow-up, Wolf, displayed greater consistency from Tyler, if not necessarily a huge amount of personal maturation. In hindsight, Tyler’s relationship with slurs is more complicated than even he let it on to be, but alongside debates of Goblin’s merits were talks of silencing Tyler for his offensive language.
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