Two songs into Tyler, the Creator’s eighth album album CHROMAKOPIA, he makes this claim: “It’s really Odd Future, all them other n****s whacked out/The biggest out the city after Kenny, that’s a fact now.” Nothing out of the ordinary for a rapper to make a claim like that, but this feels earned. Tyler and his friends called their shot when they named their group Odd Future as teenagers; they set out to turn the rap world on its head, and Tyler, their de facto leader, rose to a level of fame that surpassed the dinosaurs they were reacting to in the first place. They came up alongside Kendrick Lamar’s group Black Hippy, who were less antagonizing than Odd Future but shared the same goal of doing rap their own way and making the mainstream come to them, not the other way around. Kendrick said at the 2023 Grammys that “all we ever wanted was to be able to be the biggest underground artist of all time.” Tyler proudly accepts the silver medal.

As Tyler, Kendrick and other likeminded peers rose to fame, they didn’t completely take over mainstream music so much as they showed millions of people that there’s more out there–the phrase “biggest underground artist” suits them well. Tyler is an arena tour headliner, a Coachella headliner, and a Grammy winner, but he doesn’t really have any omnipresent hit songs and his music still sounds out of step with the bulk of RapCaviar and rap radio. He and Kendrick are both in the business of making immersive, album-oriented projects that deprioritize singles, and their success in doing so is increasingly rare as the streaming era keeps trying to send rap back to the singles+filler format of the CD era. As the first and probably only Event Rap Album of 2024, CHROMAKOPIA feels like it could be one of the last of a dying breed.

And it wasn’t always obvious that Tyler would get to this point. When he released 2013’s Wolf, he was still spinning his shock-rap wheels and it was starting to get old. If it were to turn out that Tyler had brought a legendary, paradigm-shifting run to an end by not realizing his offensive shock-factor had just turned boring, he wouldn’t be the first rapper to meet that fate. But then something changed. By 2017’s Flower Boy, Tyler shifted from bratty skate punk rapper to art-rap auteur, and he made strides to publicly mature not just as an artist but also as a person. He counteracted past homophobic jokes with revelations about his own queer sexuality, and he began to challenge a multitude of preconceived notions that society has held about him.

Tyler followed Flower Boy with Igor, an experimental, melodic album without much rapping at all that felt like the next gen’s answer to 808s & Heartbreak, and he took the opposite approach on that album’s followup, Call Me If You Get Lost, a Gangsta Grillz-inspired project that reminded the world that Tyler still thrills when it comes to just rapping. It felt like those last two projects were testing different waters, pushing Tyler to different limits. And with CHROMAKOPIA, he delivers a vast, immersive, album-oriented triumph that uses just about all the tools he’s amassed throughout the last 15 years of his career.

The growth that Tyler’s exhibited throughout his past few album cycles is the prevailing theme of CHROMAKOPIA. He’s 33 now, and he finally relates to all the advice his mother, Bonita Smith, would give him when he was growing up. Bonita herself is his guiding light on this album, showing up to provide spoken word interludes that push the narrative forward. On the gripping standout “Hey Jane,” an unplanned pregnancy makes Tyler wonder if he’s ready to become a father, and he presents that crossroads-of-life moment by staging a conversation between himself and the woman (“Jane”), attempting not just to share his perspective but to see and tell hers as well (“I’m 35 and my ovaries might not reset/I don’t wanna live my whole life feeling regret/Damn, a feeling you can never understand/You just hope to god I get my period again”). The prospect of parenthood also shows up on “Darling, I,” a song that finds Tyler reckoning with his feelings on monogamy and commitment; on “Tomorrow,” on which Tyler grapples with aging and the thought of settling down; and on album closer “I Hope You Find Your Way Home,” which trails off as Tyler ruminates over his uncertain future.

Self-reflection shows up in other ways on CHROMAKOPIA too. On “Like Him,” Tyler reckons with the traits he’s inherited from his absent father, the same one he introduced the world to 15 years ago during a mock therapy session on his debut album Bastard. On “Take Your Mask Off,” Tyler paints pictures of a gang member from a middle class home, a closeted-gay Christian man, an unhappy mother of three with a rich husband who “can’t even get alone time to think of killing [her]self,” and finally himself to show the ways in which we stifle who we really are. As on past albums, Tyler explores his own gender (“Give a fuck about pronouns, I’m that n**** and that bitch”) and sexuality (“I don’t even like girls”) in ways that challenge the heteronormativity he once played right into. Mental health and particularly paranoia pop up a lot as well.

As Tyler weaves these personal themes together without many guests at all, he also builds a musical backdrop that’s just as deep and engaging. Written, produced, and arranged by Tyler himself, CHROMAKOPIA opens with the militant march of “St. Chroma,” and from there, it ranges from sampling the ’70s Zambian rock song “Nizakupanga Ngozi” by Ngozi Family (on “Noid”) to shapeshifting jazz/funk/soul hybrids to erratic electronics to gentle acoustic guitars and beyond. It’s fitting that he first teased the album with a series of cinematic, self-directed videos, because on CHROMAKOPIA it often sounds like he’s scoring a film. His instrumentals are as expressive as his words.

Tyler both raps and sings, and sometimes brings in other singers to help like Daniel Caesar, Lola Young, Teezo Touchdown, and LaToiya Williams. But he also proves he can make an expansive, emotional, melodic album like this one and not abandon the brash rap bangers that he made his name on in the first place. “Rah Tah Tah” is classic Tyler. The subwoofer-rumbling “Thought I Was Dead” would sound like Tyler tipping his hat to ScHoolboy Q’s style even if he didn’t bring in Q himself for the second verse, and it’s one of the album’s hardest-hitting songs. The most impactful moments are the ones that dive deep into Tyler’s psyche, but CHROMAKOPIA still makes room for the posse-cut rager “Sticky” (with GloRilla, Sexyy Red, and Lil Wayne), and he lets Doechii take one of the album’s most show-stealing verses over the bubbly synths of “Balloon.” It’s tempting to compare CHROMAKOPIA‘s vast musical range to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy or its self-reflective maturation to Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, but mostly, it sounds like Tyler making an art-rap saga his own way. He’s grown a lot, but he still has that same drive to pick a form and completely disrupt it.

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