Igor Review

The instruction printed with the album tells you to arrive without expectations, and the record spends forty minutes making that necessary. There is barely any rapping on it. The bass is fuzzed into a growl, the synths are cheap on purpose, the vocals are pitched up and down until the person singing them stops being Tyler at all. Earfquake is the pop moment, a plea sung by a man with no dignity left to protect, with Playboi Carti doing something nobody requested and everybody remembers.

A Boy Is a Gun turns a Ponderosa Twins Plus One record into something anxious and tender at once. New Magic Wand is the panic, Gone, Gone and Thank You is the exhale, and the front to back sequence is the tightest he has built. What keeps it short of untouchable is the writing. Lines repeat because repetition is the emotional strategy, which works in the moment and thins out on the page, and a few of the sharper reviews said exactly that at the time.

Then it debuted at the top of the chart, took a rap award Tyler himself found funny given how little rapping is on it, and settled into most conversations as his best work. Its sound has been copied so widely since that it is easy to forget how strange it was.