Album Review: DON'T TAP THE GLASS - Tyler, The Creator

Tyler, The Creator has returned suddenly with his newest album DON’T TAP THE GLASS, and this time he’s not building a world; instead, he’s capitalizing on his well-deserved positive momentum. It’s his shortest release yet at just ten tracks and twenty-eight minutes, but it moves with intention. No concept, no alter ego, no cinematics. Just pace and presence. The title itself reads like a command: don’t interrupt, don’t dissect, don’t poke around looking for depth he isn’t offering. This album is built for motion, not meditation.

The rollout reflects that same energy. No ornate visuals, no extended teasing. Just a quiet drop in the middle of his Chromakopia tour and a note that this project wasn’t made for sitting still. Compared to his previous records — where the packaging was often as layered as the music — this one feels deliberately light. Not hollow, just unburdened. There’s nothing to decode here, no long arc to trace. It’s not a concept album, it’s a movement record.

There’s also the sense that Tyler’s experimenting again. Not reinventing himself, but pushing forward — testing out grime textures, rubbery funk, high-BPM loops that border on dance music. “Big Poe” feels like a beam of sun refracted through broken glass, with Tyler gliding over it like it’s effortless. “Sucka Free” comes through with clipped percussion and a fantastic bass — the kind of track that sounds like it was made in 15 minutes and didn’t need a second more. There’s looseness here, but not laziness. The music is sharp even when it’s fast.

And that speed matters. These songs are short — most clock in under three minutes — but they don’t feel unfinished. They arrive, make their point, and move on. Even the softer moments (“Don’t You Worry Baby,” “Tell Me What It Is”) don’t linger. They suggest emotion without spelling it out. There’s something restrained about them — like Tyler knows you’ll feel what you need to feel without him having to lay it bare. He’s said this album wasn’t built for stillness, and you can hear that in how little space it gives you to pause.

What’s compelling is how Tyler avoids spectacle without losing presence. There’s no heavy narrative or big finale. Just texture, rhythm, and restraint. Vulnerability shows up not in lyrics, but in choices — in the brevity, in the refusal to explain, in the confidence to release something this minimal with no framing around it. He’s not interested in giving you a full picture. He’s letting the edges stay loose.

There are also moments — specific cadences, basslines, or sudden drops into tenderness — that subtly gesture back toward his earlier works. Bastard’s rawness, Wolf’s oddball melody lines, the confidence of Flower Boy — they all flicker at the edges of this record without ever hijacking it. DON’T TAP THE GLASS doesn’t reach for legacy. It doesn’t try to top anything. It just constantly moves — fast, smart, and fully in its own lane. If this is Tyler in transition, it’s a fluid one — not toward a new persona, but toward lightness. That’s what makes it so refreshing. This record doesn’t pretend to be a defining moment. It just knows exactly what it is. And sometimes, that’s all you need, even if it leaves you wishing for more.

Favorite tracks: “Big Poe (feat. Sk8brd)” — “Sugar On My Tongue” — “Sucka Free” — “Ring Ring Ring” — “Don’t Tap The Glass / Tweakin’” — “I’ll Take Care of You (feat. Yebba)” — “Tell Me What It Is”

SCORE: 7.9/10

Album Review: Let God Sort Em Out - Clipse

After sixteen years away, Clipse didn’t come back to relive their former glory. They came back to finish the project they started. Let God Sort Em Out isn’t a nostalgia trip — it’s a reckoning that has finally arrived after a masterful rollout. Pharrell handles the production top to bottom, but this isn’t a return to the style of Neptunes from the 2000s. It’s sharper, colder, and sometimes stranger. The sound moves between cold-blooded minimalism and grandeur, and it frames the two brothers’ voices — Pusha T and Malice — who now rap like men who’ve realized the full cost of their ambitions.

The opening tracks, “The Birds Don’t Sing,” sets the tone with almost no fanfare. Pusha and Malice are grieving the loss of their parents. The song sits in silence before it even begins, and once it does, it lands like a prayer. There are moments on this album that feel heavier than any beat can carry, and that’s the point. Even when the flows are airtight and the bars and wordplay are vicious, there’s a weight underneath: memory, mortality, and loss. Clipse have always made music about consequences, but never this directly.

Then the album flexes. “Chains & Whips,” “P.O.V.,” and “Ace Trumpets” bring back the cold-chested luxury raps, but they’re reframed. There’s tension in the subtext and more scar tissue in the delivery. The verses land clean, but the energy isn’t youthful — it’s watchful. There’s power here, but it’s been earned the hard way. That energy carries through the middle of the album, even in moments that lean theatrical. The confidence is still there, but it’s less about proving something and more about refusing to do anything but tell the truth.

The production walks that same line. Pharrell keeps things stark — tight drums, unexpected breaks, beats that feel like they’re holding something back. It’s not trying to be pretty. There’s a rawness, even when the polish is there. But when guests show up — Kendrick, Tyler, Nas, John Legend — they feel like pieces of a grander architecture, not spotlights. They enter the world Clipse built instead of pulling us out of it.

What makes Let God Sort Em Out resonate isn’t the reunion. It’s the clarity. These aren’t two rappers picking up where they left off. These are two people who have changed since we last heard from them, and you can hear that in every line. The album is bitter, weary, sometimes defiant, but never hollow. It’s about legacy, yes, but also about grief. About what gets lost when you give your life to a thing, and what it costs to look back at all of it and try to keep going. Clipse didn’t come back to make a statement. The presence and gift of new Clipse music is the statement.

Favorite tracks: “The Birds Don’t Sing” — “Chains & Whips” — “So Be It” — “Ace Trumpets” — “E.B.I.T.D.A.” — “F.I.C.O.” — “Let God Sort Em Out/Chandeliers” — “By The Grace Of God”

SCORE: 9.5/10

Album Review: Lotus - Little Simz

Little Simz has returned with her sixth full-length studio album Lotus, and its title tells you everything you need to know before hitting play. It’s an album about emergence — how something beautiful can grow out of something else that has been tarnished. For Simz, that “something else” is the fallout from a collapsed creative partnership with her former producer Inflo, subsequent legal battles, and years of unreleased material scrapped entirely. Lotus doesn’t sound like a comeback, but instead sounds like survival. It’s measured, unsentimental, and at times, angry enough to burn through the speakers.

The album’s opening track is called “Thief,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a direct reckoning. The beat’s restrained, almost dry, leaving plenty of space for Simz to put Inflo on notice. She’s not hiding the pain, but she’s not drowning in it either. It’s a form of confrontation as closure. From there, the album starts to twist and pull: “Flood” (with Obongjayar and Moonchild Sanelly) hits like the emotional purge it’s named after. It’s anxious and cathartic in equal measure, featuring a Simz that seems as determined as ever in her blooming career. The closing four tracks on the album are as impressive of a run as Simz has ever had in her career — “Blood” is genius narrative, “Lotus” is desperate and direct in its instrumentation, and “Lonely” is as vulnerable as Simz has ever been.

There’s no moment on Lotus where things “resolve.” Even when the production softens, the weight doesn’t lift. “Blue” is one of the quietest moments toward the end of the record, and yet it’s still one of the heaviest. Sampha shows up with the exact voice you’d want for a song like this, just above a whisper, but it’s Simz who brings the emotion. She’s not just rapping about being tired, she sounds tired: of the industry, of betrayal, and of people expecting strength from her without ever asking the cost.

Production-wise, she keeps things stripped back — sometimes jazzy, sometimes grimy, but never too flashy. There’s still orchestration like we’ve grown to love on her previous records, but it’s lighter, less cinematic than her past work with Inflo. That decision feels deliberate. Nothing on this album is trying to impress you. Even the features — Wretch 32, Michael Kiwanuka, Yussef Dayes — show up more like collaborators than guests. They feel part of the architecture, not ornaments. This isn’t the album where Simz tells you how brilliant she is. It’s the one where she tells you what it cost to get to this point, further cementing the authenticity that makes her discography so authentic and magnetic.

Lotus doesn’t aim for closure, and it doesn’t pretend healing is linear. There’s no grand finale. Instead, it circles its own themes — grief, resilience, fatigue, clarity — and sits with them. That restraint is what makes it feel so human. Simz isn’t performing strength; she’s documenting the process of rebuilding it. It’s an album that offers no solutions, only honesty. And in a moment when the music industry is loud and everything is instant, Lotus feels like Simz choosing to speak slowly, carefully, and only when it really matters.

Favorite tracks: “Thief” — “Flood” — “Free” — “Lion” — “Blood” — “Lotus” — “Lonely” — “Blue”

SCORE: 9.4/10

Game Review: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

There’s something quietly bold about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It’s not the way it blends turn-based combat with real-time mechanics like parrying and QTEs, or the visual confidence of its Parisian-inspired world. What’s so bold about this game is what it’s trying to say and the questions it asks about existence itself. Beneath its art direction and theatrical presentation, this is a game deeply preoccupied with fate, impermanence, and what it means to be remembered. This isn’t just a stylish RPG — it’s a philosophical text disguised in battles and metaphors, asking what makes a life worth living when its end has already been determined.

The central storyline is chilling yet simple: once a year, a spectral figure known as the Paintress declares a number, and everyone of that age disappears. There is no explanation or resistance, just absence. You play as part of Expedition 33 — named so because every member is 33 years old, and knows that their time is almost up. What begins as a literal countdown quickly becomes something more reflective. What do we do when confronted with the certainty of death? What obligations do we carry to ourselves, to the people around us, and to the world that will keep spinning after we are gone? The game doesn’t force answers. It refuses to stop asking.

This existential unease is everywhere, from the decaying grandeur of its environments to the ways characters speak to one another. Dialogue feels curated but never stiff. There’s a recurring tension between action and futility. You’re trying to stop the cycle, but everyone around you is already grieving and letting go. That sense of elegy gives weight to every decision and conversation. Even the combat, which is fast and mechanically satisfying, carries the same tension. Every encounter is a delay, and every victory is on borrowed time.

What’s remarkable is how these themes are not just echoed in the story, but in the way the game moves. The pacing feels intentional — neither rushed or indulgent. Even the visual design supports this: blurred edges, sun-bleached architecture, and relics of joy that has faded. There are moments of surreal humor like a mime boss fight or a giant talking character named Esquie, but they’re folded into the melancholy rather than breaking it. The absurdity doesn’t dilute the emotion. This is a game that understands how strange grief can feel, how it loops, disorients and, refuses to resolve cleanly.

The final and most pivotal choice you make in the game isn’t framed as success or failure. It’s quieter than that. You’re asked whether to preserve the system — to take on the role of the Paintress and continue the cycle — or to reject it entirely, even if that means erasure. It’s not a power fantasy, it’s a reckoning. The game spends hours conditioning you to feel the weight of endings, legacy, and unintended consequences, and now it hands you the brush. Not as a reward, but as a question. Are you willing to keep erasing in the name of order? Or is it better to risk collapse for the possibility of something different and real? The choice doesn’t offer resolution, it offers reflection. And that, in many ways, is the most honest conclusion it could possibly give.

Expedition 33 isn’t interested in traditional storytelling. The world isn’t ending in the usual apocalyptic sense — it’s fading. People vanish and are forgotten. The rest move on. The real antagonist isn’t the Paintress, it’s time and escapism itself. The systems that normalize disappearance. The way grief becomes routine. And yet, in the face of that, the game still insists on finding meaning and treasuring memories. It values doing something with the time we’re given. It’s that insistence that lingers after the credits, more than any plot twist or boss battle could offer.

In the end, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is less about saving the world and more about understanding your place in it. It’s a game that invites you to reflect, to feel, and to wrestle with what you can’t fix. And somehow, counterintuitively that makes it feel hopeful. Not because everything will be okay in the end — but because trying to make it so is the journey that matters.

Album Review: Cancionera - Natalia Lafourcade

There is always a timeless quality to Natalia Lafourcade’s music. On her newest album Cancionera, that timelessness becomes deliberate. It’s etched into every lyric, chord, and moment of stillness like new embroidery on old fabric. This isn’t just an album you listen to; it’s an immersive experience you are meant to enter like a small, candlelit room during a thunderstorm. Cancionera is a deeply theatrical and symbolic departure from the grounded earnestness that defined her last project De Todas las Flores. Where that album felt like a diary — vulnerable, rooted in grief, and rebirth — Cancionera feels more like a play. There's a new character that defines it: “La Cancionera,” Lafourcade’s alter ego, who acts as both a muse and mirror, guiding the listener through themes of love, heritage, and healing.

What’s most impressive is how this character doesn’t obscure Lafourcade’s voice, but instead it sharpens it. By crafting a fictional persona and alternative voice for this album, she somehow becomes even more honest. She lets Lafourcade explore aspects of herself that don’t always get center stage, such as rage, sensuality, absurdity, and defiance. The album’s storytelling is rich with metaphor and symbols like mirrors, rivers, ghosts, and lullabies, but it never feels out of reach. Instead, it invites living interpretation and re-interpretation, like a poem that changes meaning depending on when and where you read it. Natalia has always flirted with duality, but here, she dives in headfirst.

Sonically, the album is a layered tapestry of regional Mexican music, chamber folk, and impressionist pop. Tracks like “Cocos en la Playa” shimmer with vibrant warmth through its plucked strings, suggesting palm trees swaying just out of view. It’s lighthearted and earthy, but even in its breeziness, there's a wistfulness to this track. On the other side of the spectrum is “La Bruja - Versión Cancionera,” a spectral reinvention of a traditional folk song that pulses with quiet menace. Here, Lafourcade doesn’t just cover a classic, but instead inhabits it. This range can at times suggest thematic inconsistency compared to previous projects, but that may be by design here. Her voice slips between registers, echoing like wind, evoking centuries of women who’ve sung same melody, for protection, protest, or something in between.

The album’s production is meticulous but feels incredibly organic. It doesn’t feel overworked or over-arranged — just lovingly handled from its instrumental opening and closing tracks to songs that sound like they were sung in front of crowds. The use of live recordings, analog textures, and layered acoustic instruments gives the album an almost tactile quality. It sounds like a room to stand in, not a file to streaming. Collaborations with Hermanos Gutiérrez and El David Aguilar aren’t marquee moments on the project, they are woven into the fabric of the album like threads of a larger pattern. These guest appearances don’t detract from Lafourcade’s vision. Their voices arrive not as intrusions but as echoes, as if summoned by La Cancionera herself to help add color to the narrative.

Cancionera is more than just a record. It’s a ritual. It’s an invitation to step into a dreamscape where every song is a memory you forgot you had. It’s also a reminder that honoring tradition doesn’t have to mean staying still — sometimes it means dancing with the past, reimagining it, and encouraging it to say something fit for a new context. Lafourcade isn’t just preserving heritage here; she’s conversing with it, complicating it, and making it beautiful all over again. In a time when so much music feels like background noise, Cancionera not only demands to be heard intently and fully, but experienced with every part of you — especially the parts that leans into the romanticization and beauties of everyday life.

Favorite tracks: “Aperatura Cancionera,” “Cancionera,” Cocos en la Playa,” “Amor Clandestino,” “El Coconito,” “El Palomo y La Negra,” “Cariñito de Acapulco,”" “La Bruja - Versión Cancionera,” “Luna Creciente,” “Lágrimas Cancioneras”

SCORE: 9.2/10