You’re going through it, I’m going through it. And if you pressed play on Tyler, The Creator’s new album expecting respite in the form of tightly crafted bars about luxurious misadventures and upper-echelon taste levels, well—plot twist—Tyler is going through it too.
At the risk of speaking in Stan Twitter terminology and invoking “eras,” you can always expect a new Tyler project to come wrapped up in a specific aesthetic, delineating a new chapter if not a full-on new character, an approach he’s gone full-speed on since 2019’s Igor. But the album that followed two years later, Call Me If You Get Lost, was for the most part, Just Plain T, reveling in Rolls Royce Cullinans, new yachts, a tatted passport, and a life too charmed to even really be that disturbed by heartbreak.
It’s been three years since that album dropped, his longest break between projects, and thus, an extended period of living with that particular Tyler, the Creator iteration—the one that felt the least theatrical. So his new effort Chromakopia—first teased two weeks ago and released yesterday—is a somewhat startling return to character. Don’t ask me what to make of the costume, the location emphasis on hangars, tarmacs and ports, the haircut—but off the first couple of listens, Tyler’s clearly working through some heavy angst and insecurities behind that St. Chroma iron mask.
Debuting the new music Sunday night at a listening event in LA’s Intuit Dome, Tyler explained that the early idea for his eighth album was for it to be an homage to the very streets we were standing on in Inglewood—after an album about the joys of getting lost in new places and opening oneself up to exploration and different experiences, this next project was going to be a celebration of his home, with an eye toward his formative years B.C. (Before Cockroach.) Instead, Chromakopia morphed into the album version of a vacation hangover, coming home to find the real world and all its stresses lying in wait.
For Tyler, those stresses take the form of maturity and mortality—imagine him stepping into the foyer of one of his mansions, Louis trunks at his feet, and remembering there’s no one waiting to welcome him back. In the same way that a breakup drives most of Igor and a weird third-wheel situationship colors Call Me If You Get Lost, Chromakopia seems to revolve around Tyler facing a pregnancy scare, the shock of anxieties and harsh self-assessments that came with it, and the subsequent decision to not follow it through. Whether that’s through medical means or emotional distance—or if this whole scenario is just a completely imagined circumstance rooted in real angst—is never really clear. What’s clear is that being in his early 30s with nothing to show beyond cars, cribs and critical acclaim has been weighing on him.
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