One night ahead of dropping his seventh studio album, Tyler, The Creator ushered in his Chromakopia era with a last-minute listening party to celebrate it’s arrival.
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The album’s debut came quickly after Tyler released it’s lead single “Noid,” which arrived with a black and white music video featuring Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actress Ayo Edebiri.
Thrashing on a stage of green shipping containers, sampling his latest songs for the very first time to a crowd of 17,000 fans at Los Angeles’s high-tech Intuit Dome, Tyler, wearing the same military garb and plastic mask from the “Noid” music video, told the crowd about Chromakopia “originated with growing up in these areas.”
As the album played through, Tyler took his turn pacing back and forth, ferociously bopping to the beat, flailing about, lying down, and staring off into the crowd.
Chromakopia arrives three years after his last album, Call Me If You Get Lost, and sees Tyler employing his recently shared release approach of a Monday morning drop instead of the industry standard Friday at midnight, hoping fans will take the whole week to digest the new record.
“Don’t lose y’all sleep trying to stay up, go to sleep,” Tyler quipped, addressing the fan-filled arena on Sunday, with the album hours away from release. “I’m excited for y’all to hear the album the second time, that second time when it hits you, you know if you f***in’ think it’s the worst thing ever or if you’re really f***ing with it.”
After the album played all the way through, The LA artist went on to note how the project came together from his desire to show his fans who he is, by revealing how he got there. “I was like ‘oh s***, nobody knows anything about me from before [I was 17],'” Tyler added. “Folks are like ‘oh, he’s from the suburbs.' No, n****, I was down the street here.”
Tyler explained to the crowd how most of the record was inspired by the things his mother used to tell him, that at the time, he was too young to understand. Reflecting, on how it wasn’t until adulthood when those lessons truly clicked.
“Now that I’m 33, all that stuff is like ‘oh that’s what the f*** she was talking about,'” a sweat-drenched Tyler told the crowd. “‘Oh I’m not the guy I was at 20. Oh s***, people are getting older, folks having kids and families.’ All I’ve got is a new Ferrari, that does feel kind of weird. I’ve got a grey hair on my chest. Life is life. I just wanted to write about stuff I think about when I’m dolo’ing.”
Taking the next step in his ongoing evolution from unpredictable shock rapper into one of Hip-Hop’s finest storytellers, Chromakopia sees Tyler transform those lessons he learned from his mom into music that artistically grapples with the daunting themes of adulthood, the idea of fatherhood, and love.
Check out clips from Tyler’s listening party above and listen to Chromakopia below.