(Columbia)Bursts of kaleidoscopic synth-pop, soul balladry and jazz sweep you through the latest offering in the artist’s eclectic, controversial and – against the odds – enduring career
Earlier this week, Billie Eilish was obliged to issue an apology, after an eight-year-old video of the
Singer emerged, featuring her mouthing along to a racial slur in Tyler, the Creator’s Fish, in a lyric that is also about date rape. It had provoked the kind of bad-faith performative outrage in which certain corners of the internet specialise, but, if nothing else, it functioned as a reminder of different era, in which the Odd Future collective were held to be The World’s Most Notorious Rap Group – a broiling mass of wilful controversy thanks to their lyrics – and Tyler, their de facto leader, was quaintly thought such a threat to public morals that the then-home secretary,
Theresa May, successfully petitioned to have him barred from entering the
UK.
For all the column inches expended on them, you would have been forgiven for thinking that this was not a career built to last: the succès de scandale tends to burn bright, but not long; dissenting voices wondered if it were possible to translate infamy and a willingness to give their
music away for free online into a career. Occasionally, those voices belonged to Odd Future themselves. “I could fail tomorrow. A year from now no one will give a fuck about this interview,” Tyler told the Guardian in 2012. “That’s always in the back of my head. But I have to keep doing what I’m doing.”