IGOR

The album credits list no features. That is technically true in that no guest appears in the tracklist. It is also somewhat misleading, given that Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Solange, Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, CeeLo Green, La Roux, and Charlie Wilson all appear somewhere in the record, woven into the production as vocal textures rather than credited contributions. Tyler built IGOR the way a film director builds a scene: assembling a cast and then folding them into something larger than any individual performance.

The album is structured as a complete narrative about a person called Igor who falls in love with someone who does not love him back, spirals, and slowly loses himself trying to hold onto the relationship. It runs forty minutes without pause, each track bleeding into the next, the voice of comedian Jerrod Carmichael appearing periodically between songs as a kind of Greek chorus. The production pulls from every direction at once: synth-funk, neo-soul, seventies R&B, art pop, all of it processed into a sound that belongs entirely to Tyler. He recorded parts of it in Lake Como, Italy. He recorded the song "EARFQUAKE" five years before the album came out.

IGOR won the Grammy for Best Rap Album in 2020, which surprised some people and delighted others. It is not a rap album in any conventional sense. It is an album about being heartbroken and humiliated by love and still being unable to stop, and it communicates that feeling with a precision that most artists spend entire careers chasing.