Wallflowers aren’t welcome here. “Number one, body movement/No sitting still,” Tyler, the Creator instructs in the opening seconds of his ninth solo album, laying out the first rule of his dance sanctum. It’s a funny command, considering all the crowd surfing and moshing his music tends to stoke. There’s also the matter of the deep grooves and hyperactive polyrhythms that are as essential to his catalog as his beloved chord progressions. But dancing, like sex, is a specialized and unique form of motion, and Tyler spends the madcap DON’T TAP THE GLASS rewiring his sound to tease out the difference between responding to music and expressing yourself through it.
Like GNX and The Age of Pleasure, DON’T TAP THE GLASS is an exercise in restraint from a known maximalist. The runtime is brisk—28 minutes—with half the songs under three minutes, and the longest really just two short tracks stitched together. And unlike most of Tyler’s albums, there’s no concept. Sure, he’s in ’80s rapper cosplay on the cover: shirtless, sporting a thick dookie chain, chunky rings, and tomato-red leather pants. But he’s more invested in recreating the playful and horndog mood of a Big Daddy Kane, LL Cool J, or 2 Live Crew record than channeling those rappers’ swaggering, larger-than-life personas. Tyler skitters through assorted sounds of that decade—electro, synth-funk, disco, and Miami bass—not to reinvent himself, but to get lost.
None of the resulting songs turn out to be as sticky and emotionally rich as his best work, but the record rips through strains of dance music with mixmaster fluency. Although Tyler is not a dancefloor native, the shoes fit. His music tends to play to open spaces: the skate park, the bike trail, the festival stage, the sportscar with the windows down. Even his misanthropic work from the Odd Future days, while dyspeptic and insular, evoked the endless openness of dreams. (Nightmares, natch.) Here he’s all about compression, cramming the arrangements with melodies and rhythms, rapping in quickfire splatters, and constantly in transition.
Opener “Big Poe” plays like a sampler of his idol Pharrell’s discography: there’s In My Mind-era swag rap from Tyler and Skateboard P himself, dusty N.E.R.D. drums, blaring synths, and even a sample of the Neptunes-produced “Pass the Courvoisier, Part II.” All the songs feel pressure-cooked in this way: humid, bubbling, enclosed. I’ve never heard a Tyler song in the club, but this might change that.
Tyler seems intent on taking a breather after the extensive soul-baring and rumination of last year’s Chromakopia. The challenges of settling into his 30s dominated that record, which turned his musings on parenthood, relationships, and fears into sprawling sound collages. The Tyler of DON’T TAP THE GLASS is more single-minded, keen to fuck, flex, and goof off. Repeating the album title across the record, he seems to be saying, Enjoy the music and leave me alone.
