News of Tyler, the Creator’s seventh album came as something of a surprise: it arrived a matter of months after he announced on social media that he wouldn’t be releasing any new music this year. The promotional campaign over the last couple of weeks suggested that Chromakopia would be a high-concept piece of work, the kind of album that takes listeners a long time to fully unpick. It involved a succession of mysterious videos that shifted from the sepia tones of an old TV show into full colour, sometimes – but not always – featuring the rapper wearing a mask and a military uniform: directing a platoon of men into a shipping container with the album’s title emblazoned on its side, which he then blew up; barging his way through a crowd of people before being assailed by a fan whose enthusiasm turns into a kind of eye-rolling madness and whose phone becomes a gun; rapping on top of a military aircraft within which his masked alter ego lurks, glowering. Speculation as to what it all meant followed, as it was clearly intended to: one frequently floated theory was that the album would involve the debut of new persona, possibly based on a character from the classic children’s novel The Phantom Tollbooth.
But, like the announcement that no new music was forthcoming, the business with the mask appears to be misdirection, at least as far as an alter ego is concerned. Lyrically, Chromakopia gives every impression of being both prosaic and personal: it feels somehow telling that none of the album’s guest artists – Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino among them – have been listed on streaming services, as if trumpeting their presence would distract from its inward-looking mood. There’s stuff about the pressures of fame (Noid and Rat Tah Tah prickle with distrust of everyone from Tyler, the Creator’s accountants to his fans) and a swaggering dismissal of his critics on Thought I Was Dead, but the main lyrical themes that run through it are the kind of worries that tend to beset people at that point in your 30s where it becomes abundantly clear to even the most ostensibly irresponsible and carefree individual that you’re now an adult. Whether your failure to find a lasting relationship thus far means you’re fated to live the rest of your life alone; whether parenthood is something you’re capable of embracing; whether you’re doomed to repeat the mistakes made by your own parents; whether the career you’ve been pursuing is sufficiently rewarding in and of itself.
These are seldom easy questions to answer, which perhaps accounts for why Chromakopia sounds so unsettled. The lyrics double back and contradict themselves – switching from boastful self-aggrandisement to crippling self-doubt and loathing, sometimes in the space of a single verse. On Tomorrow he goes from loudly proclaiming his free-spiritedness – “I don’t like cages, I’d rather be flooding” – to confessing a sort of despairing emptiness: “All I got is photos of my ’Rari and some silly suits.”
Elsewhere, its tracks have a tendency to end up in the last place you expect. Judge Judy starts out as a standard-issue sex rhyme – “body rubs, bondage and cream pies” – complete with a backing track peppered with orgasmic moans, but ends with a suicide note, while Like Him ponders the topic of paternal abandonment before winding up with the voice of Tyler, the Creator’s mother, informing him that it’s her fault he never met his father. On Take Your Mask Off, he admonishes a succession of figures for living a lie, from a homophobe who turns out to be a closeted homosexual to a wealthy but unhappy housewife, before suddenly turning the lyrical focus on himself: “You talk a lot of shit to not even be number one.”
The music is similarly unsettled. Tracks shift and slip their moorings, lurching from one sound to another, frequently changing completely over the course of a few minutes. Musical ideas gush chaotically forth. Noid is built around distorted, heavy-metal-ish guitars, but the power chords they strike keep abruptly short-circuiting to oddly disquieting effect: a striking sample from 70s Zamrock band Ngozi Family vies for space with Willow Smith’s softly cooing backing vocals. Elsewhere, minimal Neptunes-influenced beats abut lush Beach Boys harmonies, and folky acoustic guitar figures appear alongside lush G-funk-inspired synths and the sound of an 80s R&B slow jam is disturbed by machine-gun drum rolls. It’s held together by a profusion of gasps and grunts and feral barks that thread through the rhythm tracks, lending even the most laid-back tracks a claustrophobic feel.
After an hour, it ends without any real sense of resolution: the closing track is called I Hope You Find Your Way Home, but one doesn’t hold out much hope. It finds Tyler, the Creator still thrashing around – “I’m slipping, I’m slipping … I need a hand” – constantly contradicting himself about his hopes for the future. An album that began with its author denying its existence, Chromakopia ultimately seems to manifest a state of confusion, in which everything is in flux and nothing is quite as it initially seems. It achieves that to enthralling and exhausting effect.