News from Tyler, the Creator’s seventh album came as a surprise: it arrived a few months after he announced on social media that he wouldn’t be releasing any new music this year. The promotional campaign in recent weeks suggested that Chromakopia would be a high-concept piece of work, the kind of album that takes listeners a long time to fully unpack. It involved a succession of mysterious videos that changed from the sepia tones of an old TV show to full color, sometimes – but not always – in which the rapper wore a mask and a military uniform: leading a platoon of men to a shipping container with the the album’s title was written on the side, which he then blew up; fighting his way through a crowd of people before being attacked by a fan whose enthusiasm turns into a kind of eye-rolling frenzy and whose phone becomes a gun; beating atop a military plane in which his masked alter ego lurks menacingly. Speculation about what it all meant ensued, as was clearly intended: one theory often floated was that the album would mark the debut of a new personality, possibly based on a character from the classic children’s novel The Phantom Tollbooth.

But like the announcement that no new music was coming out, the mask thing seems like a deception, at least as far as an alter ego is concerned. Lyrically, Chromakopia gives the impression of being both prosaic and personal: it feels somehow telling that none of the album’s guest artists – including Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino – are listed on streaming services, as if trumpeting their presence draws attention would distract from the inner atmosphere. -looking mood. There’s stuff about the pressures of fame (Noid and Rat Tah Tah prick with distrust of everyone from Tyler, the Creator’s accountants to his fans) and a boastful dismissal of his critics on Thought I Was Dead, but the main lyrical themes walking through It’s the kind of worry that affects people around the age of 30, when it becomes glaringly obvious to even the most apparently irresponsible and carefree person that you’re now an adult. Or the fact that you have failed to find a lasting relationship so far means that you are destined to live alone for the rest of your life; whether parenthood is something you can embrace; whether you are doomed to repeat the mistakes of your own parents; whether the career you are pursuing is sufficiently rewarding in itself.

These are rarely easy questions to answer, which may explain why Chromakopia sounds so troubled. The lyrics double and contradict themselves – shifting from boastful self-aggrandizement to crippling self-doubt and disgust, sometimes in the space of a single verse. On Tomorrow he goes from loudly proclaiming his free-spiritedness – “I don’t like cages, I’d rather flood” – to confessing a kind of desperate emptiness: “All I have are pictures of my ‘Rari and some crazy to take .”

Elsewhere, the songs tend to end up in the last place you’d expect. Judge Judy starts off as a standard sex rhyme – ‘body rubs, bondage and cream pies’ – complete with a backing track laced with orgasmic moans, but ends with a suicide note, as Like Him ponders the subject of paternal abandonment before wrapping up. in the voice of Tyler, the Creator’s mother, telling him that it is her fault that he never met his father. On Take Your Mask Off he admonishes a range of characters for living a lie, from a homophobe who turns out to be a closeted homosexual to a rich but unhappy housewife, before suddenly turning the lyrical focus on himself: “You talk a lot Shit not even being number one.”

The music is also restless. Tracks shift and slide from their footing, lurching from one sound to the next, often changing completely over the course of a few minutes. Musical ideas emerge chaotically. Noid is built around distorted, heavy metal-esque guitars, but the power chords they hit keep short-circuiting abruptly, with a strangely unsettling effect: a striking sample from ’70s Zamrock band Ngozi Family competes for space with the softly cooing backing vocals by Willow Smith. Elsewhere, minimal, Neptune-influenced beats meet lush Beach Boys harmonies, and folky acoustic guitar figures appear alongside lush, G-funk-inspired synths, and the sound of an ’80s R&B slow jam is disrupted by machine gun drum rolls. It’s held together by an abundance of gasps, growls and feral barks running through the rhythm tracks, giving even the most laid-back songs a claustrophobic feel.

After an hour it ends without any sense of determination: the closing song is called I Hope You Find Your Way Home, but you don’t have much hope in it. It finds Tyler, the Creator, still lying around – “I’m slipping, I’m slipping… I need a hand” – constantly contradicting himself about his hopes for the future. Chromakopia, an album that began with a denial of its existence by its author, ultimately seems to exhibit a state of confusion, where everything is in flux and nothing is as it initially seems. It achieves that to captivating and exhausting effect.