Announced just two days before its July 21st release, the mission statement of ‘DON’T TAP THE GLASS’ is laid out by Tyler in its opening track ‘Big Poe’: “Number one: Body movement, no sitting still / Number two: Only speak in glory, Leave your baggage at home / Number three: Don’t tap the glass”.
He further elaborated on this in a statement posted to social media that explained the album was made for body movement. Whether dancing, running, driving, the album is there to forget about your insecurities and anxieties and just move.
It’s fitting, then, that ‘DON’T TAP THE GLASS’ is the wildest, bounciest, and, of course, danciest album that the Hawthorne rapper and producer has released in quite some time. While every Tyler, The Creator album has its moments of infectious dance energy (‘Earfquake’ on ‘IGOR’ and ‘RISE!’ on ‘Call Me If You Get Lost’ for example), he’s spent the better part of a decade releasing albums that focus more on being cohesive, conceptual wholes, building specific aesthetics and stories. He hasn’t really let an album just be an album since 2015’s ‘Cherry Bomb’, which is far from a bad thing, but it’s nice to see that Tyler can still just make a collection of great songs if he wants.
‘DON’T TAP THE GLASS’ jumps wildly across a variety of sounds across its 28 minute runtime, the shortest album that Tyler has dropped to date. The previously mentioned opener ‘Big Poe’ is a ‘Cherry Bomb’-esque slice of bombast with grimy bass synths driving some of Tyler’s funniest lines in some time (“I don’t trust white people with dreadlocks”). The track also sports a feature from Pharrell doing his best Swizz Beatz impression under his Sk8brd alias, as well as a Busta Rhymes sample on the bridge to bring the tracks chaotic energy together.
Tracks like ‘Stop Playing With Me’, which got a music video featuring appearances from LeBron James and legendary hip-hop duo Clipse (whose comeback album Tyler popped up on just weeks before ‘DON’T TAP’ dropped), follow the same frenzied approach as ‘Big Poe’, while other tracks like ‘Sucka Free’ and ‘Ring Ring Ring’ are meaty chunks of the neo-soul production that Tyler has spent pretty much his entire career perfecting, but with enough bounce to keep that dance energy going. Not once does the album slow down or switch the pace up enough to interrupt the listener's body movement.
The real MVPs on the album are the back-to-back jams ‘Don’t You Worry Baby’ and ‘I’ll Take Care of You’. Ironically, these are the tracks that feature Tyler behind the mic the least. ‘Don’t You Worry Baby’ is driven by a lovely vocal performance from Madison McFerrin and a sample of 12 Gauge’s ‘Let Me Ride’. Similarly, ‘I’ll Take Care of You’ sports a Yebba feature and samples of Crime Mob’s ‘Knuck If You Buck’ and the title track of Tyler’s own ‘Cherry Bomb’. Tyler makes liberal use of samples and throwbacks to times past because he knows people want to hear the hits when they’re partying. He gives us the hits, and he puts his own spin on them.
The one slight elephant in the room when it comes to ‘DON’T TAP THE GLASS’ is how soon it was released after his last album. ‘CHROMOKOPIA’ dropped in October 2024, and was Tyler’s most open and emotionally complex album (No small feat considering this is the same man that made ‘IGOR’). Because of that, ‘DON’T TAP’ might feel like a bit of a comedown to some, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. After releasing songs as heavy as ‘Judge Judy’ and ‘Like Him’, it must be cathartic to just get down and dance, just move around and forget everything, and ‘DON’T TAP THE GLASS’ is a perfect album for just that.
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