It’s tempting to compare Chromakopia to Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, the last event rap album that doubled as a 73-minute-long therapy session. (Tyler, the Creator, ever-punctual, clocks out before the hour’s over.) But it’s just as easy to forget that 15 years ago, just seconds into his debut record, Tyler Okonma pitched down his voice to introduce the first in a cast of characters that inhabit Bastard: Dr. TC, who acts as his therapist. The first piece of information he reveals about himself? His father’s dead, or he might as well be. The fact of his absence has been a prevailing theme in Tyler’s discography: despite tweeting that he’d already moved on from that trauma while recording 2013’s Wolf, he still addressed him directly and vehemently on songs like ‘Answer’, suggesting that it was more about the progression of a narrative than a personal reckoning. That image of Tyler, the Creator now seems distant, yet also, to his oldest fans as much as himself, inescapable – he’s as quick to invoke the early days of Odd Future on the new album as he is to declare, “That version of T that you knew was a memory.” But the signature rawness with which he tackles his contradictions, always somehow muddling into self-mythology, remains integral to his growth as a lyricist and performer.
The build-up to Chromakopia primed us for a new era of Tyler, the Creator: a sepia-toned visual aesthetic, a main character drawn from Norton Juster’s 1961 children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth, and so, it seemed, a new persona. Every one of his recent alter egos, from Tyler Baudelaire on Call Me If You Get Lost to the titular characters of IGOR and Flower Boy, aren’t too unlike the early ones in that they served as windows into his own psyche, except that they allowed for softer, more introspective, and, as an extension of his celebrity status, paranoid sides of himself. But after killing off his former selves on the music video for 2023’s ‘Sorry Not Sorry’, Tyler is left with no choice but to remove the veil of a character study; he gives form to the masked St. Chroma character, wearing a military jacket and foreshadowed in that same video, but doesn’t go as far to weave him into the narrative fabric of the album. The facade is thinner than ever, and he has no one to turn to but himself. On the album highlight ‘Take Off Your Mask’, he tears into the lives of several characters pretending to be something other than their true selves, from a closeted Christian preacher to a stay-at-home mom burying her loneliness and depression. But in a classic twist, he confirms the suspicion that his ultimate target is, in fact, himself: “Boy, you selfish as fuck, that’s why you scared of bein’ a parent/Boy, that therapy needed, I dare you to seek it, but I’ll lose a bet.”
So Chromakopia scans as the dare more than the actual therapy, staring into the mirror of an early midlife crisis and finally seeing – through the fear and trepidation rather than any semblance of healing – your reflection stripped down to the core. What could’ve been another victory lap instead shines as an attempt to reconcile his conflicted personality – and the disparate styles that come with it. The sonic chaos of Call Me If You Get Lost rumbles through these songs, too, but instead of feeling celebratory and colourful, it feeds into the record’s insular and anxious flow. Its bangers are also standouts, not only because they find Tyler at his most rambunctious and electric but because of how well-tailored they are to his guests: the wildly overcrowded ‘Sticky’ explodes with verses from Glorilla, Sexyy Redd, and Lil Wayne, Schoolboy Q and Santigold join him in swaggering through ‘Thought I Was Dead’, and Doechii stands out as the best match to his maniacal energy on the penultimate ‘Balloon’. But his flexes make Chromakopia sound no less unsettled, as if the boastfulness is only a form of self-preservation that ultimately can’t save him from himself. “All I got is photos of my ‘Rari and some silly suits,” he realizes on ‘Tomorrow’; “So I’ll be lonely with these Grammys when it’s all said and done” is his conclusion after sidestepping monogamy on the lavish ‘Darling, I’.
In addition to dialing down the shock factor in favour of confessionalism, Tyler’s post-Cherry Bomb output tends to eschew the bratty sprawl of his early work to create immersive, though still overwhelming, listening experiences. Chromakopia pulls this off while being both conceptually and musically messier than anything he’s put out since Flower Boy, but only because it’s reflective of his tumultuous journey. It has no right being as cohesive as it is, yet the exultant rage of ‘Rah Tah Tah’ naturally leads to the constant unease of being in the public eye on ‘Noid’, which brilliantly samples ’70s Zamrock band Ngozi Family’s ‘Nizakupanga Ngozi’; the frantic pulse of ‘I Killed You’ relaxes into the sexual euphoria of ‘Judge Judy’; and the hope he expresses on ‘Take Your Mask Off’ – toward those other characters, fictional or not, but also himself – ripples through the beginning of ‘Tomorrow’.
But perhaps nothing binds these songs together more than Tyler’s attempt to turn this self-exploration into empathy: something lighter. It’s not always successful, often self-consciously so. The ending of ‘Judge Judy’ is darker than anyone could expect, to the point that Tyler himself seems unsure how to handle the friction musically. ‘Hey Jane’, which shares its name with a telehealth abortion provider, is framed as a conversation between himself and a woman in the midst of a pregnancy scare; though his perspective includes lines like “You gotta deal with all the mental and the physical change/ All the heaviest emotions, and the physical pain,” his words come up short. It’s not until he flips the script again by adopting the woman’s perspective that they really resonate: “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.” No pressure, they both affirm, a phrase that echoes elsewhere on the album, which of course is never able to shake it off entirely.
Tyler, the Creator may not be ready to embrace the prospect of fatherhood or other types of commitment, but his worries around them also differentiate Chromakopia from an album like Mr. Morale. More importantly, the level of vulnerability on display justifies Tyler’s choice to let his mother, Bonita Smith, serve as the Greek chorus on the album – a stark contrast to DJ Drama’s hypeman role on Call Me If You Get Lost. She’s the first voice we hear on Chromakopia, and he knows her advice will illuminate his shortcomings as much as guide him along. But the real gut punch arrives on ‘Like Him’, which ends with her admitting that his father was a “good guy,” going as far as to claim responsibility for his absence. The question that haunts Tyler throughout the track and hides behind many others here – how much he really might have in common with this person he’s never met – takes on a totally new meaning. Tyler doesn’t examine it further; there’s no suggestion the revelation has changed his attitude in the slightest. But if nothing else, it’s an incentive to stop perceiving and constructing himself through the lens of others – especially when there’s so many of us. Only he knows where that leaves Tyler, the Creator.