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“Goblin” came across as trolling, and it succeeded in putting him and Odd Future on the map. From the start, he’s expressed a sensibility that avoids sincerity and earnestness. This is an album that uses other people’s voices and constantly overdubs, speeds up, and slows down Tyler’s own voice to tell that story. It’s anyone’s guess whether it’s autobiographical. The love story “IGOR” tells certainly sounds heartfelt. His ability to make an album that feels so personal while opening itself to a lengthy roster of guests, some of whom are buried in the mix, feels new. Where he was once content to throw together grating combinations of minor-key piano chords and off-key synthesizers, “IGOR” continues the tunefulness of “Flower Boy,” although it also keeps up his practice of reinventing his sound with each album. You can trace the distorted electronics and Neptunes influence here back to his earliest music, but the bratty aesthetic of “Goblin” and his 2009 mixtape “Bastard” is long gone. Tyler isn’t a technically skilled singer, but his production on “IGOR” spans genres ably. They can’t make it work and break up in the album’s last third, as suggested by the final two song titles: “I Don’t Love You Anymore” and “Are We Still Friends?” and the difference in tone between the former’s low-fi collage, with a cheap drum machine loud in the mix, and the latter’s tentatively upbeat, jazzy soul. “Boy With a Gun” finally makes it clear that the object of this narrator’s desire is a man.
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“Running Out of Time” suggests that that partner is not accepting their sexuality: “Take your mask off, I need her out of the picture/ Stop lyin’ to yourself, I know the real you.” “New Magic Wand” expresses his jealousy toward that woman. “IGOR” follows the story of a love affair with a partner who’s in a relationship with a woman. But a video produced by the website Genius showing the history of gay references in his lyrics shows the ironic ambiguity of his early lyrics’ homophobia, which now seems like it was a cover for a real attraction to men. Given his history, “Flower Boy” drew accusations of queer-baiting and suggestions he was adopting a new persona to get publicity. Tyler still hasn’t made any unambiguous declarations about his sexuality outside his lyrics. and late Outkast’s mix of soul, rock, and hip-hop. The inclusion of spoken-word commentary from Jerrod Carmichael and tendency to base some of the songs on fragmentary, repeated lyrics evokes Blood Orange’s “Negro Swan” and Solange’s “When I Get Home” (She sings on “I Think.”) “Gone, Gone/ Thank You” ventures into psychedelic pop. On Twitter shortly before the release of “IGOR,” Tyler told his fans that “it’s not a rap album.” It departs from narrow definitions of hip-hop, with him singing more than he raps. He pitch-shifts his vocals in every direction and feeds synthesizers through distortion, but he’s gone past the punk-rap aesthetic of his first few albums. “IGOR” returns to the sound of his third album, “Cherry Bomb,” with a far more polished and coherent aesthetic. When he released “Flower Boy” in 2017, its warm, melodic sound was a surprise, but lyrics like “This next line will have them going like whoa/ I’ve been kissing white boys since 2004,” and the extended metaphor for an agonized life in the closet on “Garden Shed” marked a bigger change of direction from his early music. So Tyler, the Creator has ended up in a much different place than he started out from.