Igor Igor Igor

My favorite tracks of the album (right now): "A BOY IS A GUN" and "WHAT'S GOOD."

Producing, writing, and performing a whole album is no small feat for one man to undertake. The risk and the hard work, however, have evidently paid off with the stellar release from Tyler: Igor. Producing your own album alone gives you a large amount of room to experiment creatively with your music, without the limits that a record label places on artists. It seems that after the successful release of Flower Boy, which was also solely produced by Tyler, Sony music gave Tyler the trust to produce Igor alone. Tyler has always been known for his experimental sound. Some of his ventures, however, such as Cherry Bomb not always garnering glistening reviews.

Flower Boy saw Tyler's departure from rap, favoring a lot more singing and melodic pieces. It doesn't lose the abrasiveness of Cherry Bomb on tracks such as "Who Dat Boy?" but shows a much more melodic focus on later tracks. It was obvious that Tyler had taken the time to learn a lot about musical structure and chords, and then broke all the rules and conventions he had learned.

Igor shows brilliant development from Flower Boy, both breaking rules of music mercilessly while creating a wonderfully cohesive album that runs as an art piece rather than a standard album, as every track leads onto the next seamlessly, developing on ideas rather than having starkly different tracks run alongside each other. This cohesiveness carries into the integration of the features on the album, too. The album features an extensive credits list of mega stars, from Kanye West to Kali Uchis. However, a lot of the features are almost unrecognisable due to the way they have been integrated into the songs. Every feature is used to boost the versatility of the sounds in the album, while carrying similar tone and musical ideas. Tyler has a clear vision for the record, and uses features to add depth to the ideas he conveys. That being said, the distinctions between the voices of the features are not entirely lost; just masterfully integrated to create a satisfying blend of sound.

Tyler doesn't shy away from dissonance on this album, either. Have you ever been skating or biking and fallen off and grazed your knees? I'm not sure if this is just me, but I've always rather enjoyed that experience, as there's something very interesting to me about being that in control of my fragile life. So in a way the abrasiveness of grazing skin while doing something fun is a rather enjoyable experience in many ways other than one. His use of dissonance is comparable to this; almost irritating and abrasive at points, but always resolving satisfyingly as part of the motif he conveys.

He also achieves this by swiftly switching between musical ideas within the same song. His melody lines are generally rather repetitive, but once an idea has been fully developed Tyler doesn't shy away from moving onto the next, usually surprising the ears of the listener. Despite this, all the melody lines carry general characteristics which make them work well together tonally. The use of reverb on the synthesizer is an example of this, as well as the backing singers often carrying melodies through the album.

All in all, Igor is an extremely experimental middle ground between Cherry Bomb and Flower Boy, marrying the melodic accessibility of Flower Boy with the abrasive dissonance of Cherry Bomb. Tyler has pulled off a large task brilliantly, showing how much he has developed and improved as an artist. Igor sees Tyler be very sure of himself and his musical identity, completely unafraid to do exactly what he wants with his music. This sets Tyler apart from the background noise of mainstream rap today, making a lot of artists look simply boring.