TYLER, THE CREATOR - Don’t Tap The Glass

Welcome!

Number one, body movement (Funky)

No sitting still (Dance, bro)

Number two (Hahahaha), only speak in glory (Yeah)

Leave your baggage at home (None of that deep shit)

Number three (Nigga), don’t tap the glass.

All invitations to sit comfortably and savor each note and word at leisure—doled out like a modern-day Jehovah's Witness just eight months ago for the launch of "Chromakopia"—are torn to shreds: Tyler, The Creator returns with a dazzling grin plastered across his face and flips practically every card in the deck. The order of the day now is to dance, not give a damn, and screw around while there's still time.

"Don't Tap The Glass" arrives as a surprise on a suffocating, scorching afternoon, amid geopolitical obscenities, tariffs, counter-tariffs and all the other tired nonsense that unfortunately keeps marking 2025 so closely. Tyler himself announces it on social media on July 18th, while fans struggle to grasp what's actually happening, convinced for a few hours that the Californian musician had dropped an extended version of "Chromakopia" or, at most, a new single. Instead, three days later, seemingly out of nowhere, a new work is born—the ninth of his career for the all-around Los Angeles rapper.

But that's not all: for the album's listening party, Tyler invites three hundred people to Santa Monica with a symbolic five-dollar entry ticket. Three hundred souls who suddenly find themselves listening to the album with him twice in a row, at a gathering announced on Instagram where the motto is: don't take photos, don't record any video, and just let yourself go to the music pouring out of a giant speaker. In the rare footage that did surface on TikTok, Tyler dances like a man possessed alongside the lucky few who managed to get in. It's an initiative that ties in with the underlying themes of the songs on "Don't Tap The Glass", one above all: the fear of not dancing in public to avoid being filmed by someone and possibly becoming a meme forever.

Given the premise, the opening can only be jarring, as is the whole album, for that matter. Tyler spends the whole time urging you to shake your ass, and in the same breath he won't tolerate anyone questioning his status quo. He does this while talking ironically about lavish flights in the company of Maverick Carter and LeBron James, so much so that in an interview for Hot97 he says: "I don't get private jets, I fly economy, listen to music and eat cookies". Then he invokes Mantronix, dropping in an extract of "King Of The Beats" more than once, giving himself over to a spacey funk, very eighties in its sounds and beats. And just one more excellent sample would be enough, or rather "Pass The Courvoisier Part II" by Busta Rhymes in the booming "Big Poe", to frame the tight confines of an album conceived to shake off the paranoias of the past.

There's indeed Pharrell Williams right away acting as master of ceremonies, for a first potential summer hit, ahead of the synthetic beat of "Sugar On My Tongue", a track that sounds almost played and sung like a videogame, complete with a special bounced between a siren and a restart with a whiff of french touch. And then a soulful ballad, "Sucka Free", to form a simply perfect opening trio.

Are you from Harlem? Make your arms and legs shake, uh-huh

Give me that slice of cream, is it your birthday? Uh-huh

I got a brush, give me your wallet, I’ll pay, uh-huh

Don’t need no air, I stay down there ’til I fade (Girl, I’m dead)

Tyler is in damn fine form. No doubt about it. And how he managed to pull out such inspired songs in so little time obviously remains a mystery. Because "Don't Tap The Glass" is a delightfully goofy party and, notwithstanding a marked swagger, the tracks lodge in your head and vibrate under your skin instantly. Sure, there's also a moment to sit down at the table with Ray Parker Jr. and run a couple of pounds of gel through your hair ("Ring Ring Ring"), in a song with a synth-funk groove that takes everything right back to the early 80s and the orchestral atmospheres of the era's soap operas, with the phone ringing and the inevitable I love you in the background.

Barely time to hang up the phone, and the party picks up steam again: "Don't Tap That Glass/ Tweakin'" is the mash up, part hip-hop in Glaslamp Killer style and part random disco-music, to be mixed all night long. Madison McFerrin turns up instead on the notes of "Don't You Worry Baby", the other soulful gem of an album with no dips in quality. And there's also Yebba lulling us in "I'll Take Care of You", a fairy-tale lullaby that evolves into a Madlib-style instrumental in its second half.

It's already been said that "Don't Tap The Glass" is the pop rap album of the summer, right?

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01/08/2025