When Tyler, the Creator received his first Grammy for best rap album in 2020, winning for the experimental IGOR , the rapper accepted the honor with his mom, Bonita Smith, at his hip. “You did a great job raising this guy,” he joked. For anyone tuned into the rapper’s transition from cockroaching-eating edgelord provocateur to petulant, craft-focused tinkerer to progressive wave-maker, it felt like an acknowledgment of a maturation arc running in tandem with a creative breakthrough, reaping the rewards of her rearing.
After taking a victory lap in 2021 with CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST , which won him an additional best rap album Grammy, he seems to have found himself at another crossroads, considering both the next stages of adulthood and stardom. Standing next to him again, through it all, is his mother. But even she can’t help him through the challenges he’s up against now — chief among them, becoming his own man.
Tyler’s new album, CHROMAKOPIA , is an artistic rubicon, the point at which previous evolutions from mischievous (and, at times, offensive) instigations of his public to more level-headed bouts of self-discovery slam into a second wave of maturity, facing encroaching responsibilities with life-altering, lifelong and even life-or-death stakes. In the throes of the paranoia and anxiety brought on by these shifts, this second big transition of his career leads him on an exhilarating odyssey, oscillating dramatically between punchy proclamations and more sub.