Music fans have been speculating about the release date of Tyler The Creator’s new album for weeks after a project earnings report gave it a tentative release date sometime this summer. However, as it turns out, it’s coming out even sooner than that. Tyler posted the new album’s title, cover, and release date on his Instagram just moments ago. It’s called Igor and it’s actually due next Friday, May 17. Check out the post below.
The announcement simply reads, “All songs written, produced, and arranged by Tyler Okonma,” which is pretty par for the course for Tyler ever since his debut album Bastard. The multi-talented 28-year-old has been teasing his new musical direction for the past week, releasing a pair of untitled preview videos featuring neck-cracking basslines and a recentered focus on rapping since his 2017 album Flower Boy embraced moodier melodies. Whether that means Tyler will use his impressive rap pen to address the slurs leveled at him by Eminem on Kamikaze remains to be seen, but if Tyler really is set to spend more of this album spitting than singing, it’s bound to appeal to many of his earliest supporters and his early critics as well. His string of loose raps from last year alongside ASAP Rocky and on his own on tracks like “Okra” showed a more polished, pointed pen game for a rapper who was already in his generation’s upper echelon of straight-up rhymers.
