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.

He remains a chameleonic maestro despite that willed distance. He’s a randy funkateer on “Sugar on My Tongue,” happily munching box over shimmering synths and a springy kickdrum. “Don’t need no air, I stay down there till I fade,” he vows, ad-libbing a theatrical “Girl I’m dead” for extra horny oomph. He sings most of “Ring Ring Ring”—the latest entry in his growing collection of songs about missed connections—in his fluttery Igor register, lovestruck and dewy-eyed like a Motown singer. The disco strings and electric key melodies up the yearning, retro feel.

“Sucka Free” riffs on last year’s loosie and “Hey Now” remix, “That Guy,” threading talkbox vocals, groovy synths, and bouncy drums into a breezy rider jam. “This that Eastside, Hawthorne, ride down El Segundo to PCH shit,” Tyler says at the top of the song, setting the easygoing vibe. The period cosplay isn’t as immersive as the full-fledged worlds Tyler’s conjured on previous records, but he’s a great master of ceremonies.

Tyler’s been all in on California signifiers since the Pop Out, the West Coast (and anti-Drake) jamboree where he got one of the loudest receptions. The talkbox, a fixture of the Zapp and Parliament records that would become an important backbone of G-funk, appears on “Sucka Free.” There’s what sounds like Too $hort “BEEATCH” ad-libs on the title track, and Tyler’s frequent use of “weird” to describe dudes he’s wary of. Even as he does deeply Tyler things, like recruiting Yebba for a track that smears Crime Mob’s crunk classic “Knuck If You Buck” over airy synths and shuffling breakbeats, his home state feels top of mind. “Six nights at Crypto/Shit, I should have did SoFi,” he says on “Tweakin.’” The former venue is where the Lakers play; the latter is where Beyoncé and Taylor Swift perform.

Despite its big tent and low stakes, DON’T TAP THE GLASS is a record only Tyler could make: retro but not nostalgic; tender but steely; jangly yet slick. “I fucked her, her friend, her friend, her nigga, and his bitch,” he raps at one point, humored by his location in the center of a web of deceit. He’s the mastermind and an invisible presence, a dynamic he seems to find on the dancefloor as well. Sometimes crowds make for great hiding spots.