The big releases you need to hear from the week ahead.
With their fifth studio album, ‘The Great Impersonator’, set to drop on Friday (25th October), the New Jersey-born shape-shifter is about to take us on a time-travelling odyssey that would make The Doctor’s head spin.
Words: Dan Harrison.
Tyler, The Creator is nothing if not a bit of a contrarian – an artist who treats convention like a particularly annoying suggestion that deserves to be crumpled up and tossed in the nearest designer wastebasket. While his contemporaries chase virality with the desperation of TikTok dance instructors, Tyler’s dropping ‘CHROMAKOPIA’ at stupid-o-clock on a Monday morning – at least if you’re on the US East Coast. By the time you read this, it’ll already have arrived (because apparently, even release schedules need a Tyler-sized shake-up to wake up).
The announcement arrived via ‘St. Chroma’, a visual fever dream that plays like a Jodorowsky film filtered through a Supreme lookbook. Tyler, masked and commanding, leads a procession of equally obscured figures through desert landscapes toward revelation – or at least toward a very aesthetically pleasing shipping container. The whole thing culminates in an explosion of colour that transforms his carefully constructed monochrome world into something more vibrant. How very Tyler.
This is, after all, an artist who’s spent the last decade and a half painting in increasingly complex shades. From Odd Future’s enfant terrible to Grammy-winning auteur, from provocateur to polymath, Tyler’s evolution reads like a masterclass in artistic self-actualisation. Each album arrives as its own universe, complete with corresponding aesthetics, alter-egos, and carefully coordinated Golf le Fleur palettes – because why stop at changing your sound when you can build an entire lifestyle empire?
The literary inspiration behind ‘CHROMAKOPIA’ feels particularly fitting – drawing from The Phantom Tollbooth’s Chroma the Great, a conductor whose orchestra creates the colours of the world. It’s exactly the kind of reference that would have seemed impossible from the Tyler of ‘Goblin’ era, but makes perfect sense from an artist who’s transformed from wolf to flower boy to Igor, each incarnation more fully realised than the last.
The rollout itself plays like a piece of performance art. Mysterious trucks traverse America bearing the album’s imagery, their surfaces already marked by eager fans (turning vandalism into viral marketing with the kind of efficiency that would make a corporate brand manager weep with joy). The accompanying tour announcement – featuring Lil Yachty and Paris Texas – suggests ‘CHROMAKOPIA”s live incarnation will be as meticulously crafted as its recorded form.
Daniel Caesar’s ghostly vocals on the teaser track hint at the album’s collaborative spirit, while Thundercat’s signature bass wizardry and Willow’s ethereal backing vocals suggest Tyler’s assembling his most sophisticated sonic palette yet. But make no mistake – this remains fundamentally Tyler’s vision, with all songs written, produced, and arranged by Tyler Okonma (notably choosing his government name over his Wolf Haley alter ego, like a superhero finally comfortable enough to reveal his secret identity).
It’s all deliciously pointed. Coming off his recent Austin City Limits performance – which he suggested might be his last show for a while, with all the dramatic flair of a retired prizefighter – ‘CHROMAKOPIA’ arrives just before his annual Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival in Los Angeles. It’s a sequence of events that positions the album as both culmination and genesis, an ending that circles back to become a beginning – exactly the kind of narrative complexity Tyler lives for.
The project marks his first full-length since 2021’s ‘Call Me If You Get Lost’, but this feels less like a gap between releases and more like a necessary gestation period. Tyler albums are complete artistic statements, each one representing a distinct evolution in both sound and vision. From the raw aggression of ‘Goblin’ through the emotional maturity of ‘Flower Boy’ to the sophisticated storytelling of ‘IGOR’, each release has pushed not just Tyler’s boundaries but those of hip-hop itself.
The second single, ‘Noid’, deepens the mystery, showing our masked protagonist – presumably St. Chroma himself – pursued by frenzied admirers before retreating to a fortified house. It’s a visual that plays with themes of isolation, transformation, and the weight of attention – recurring motifs in Tyler’s work that here feel less like artistic preoccupations and more like mythology in the making.
Rather than stick to the safety of algorithmic norms, Tyler continues to chart his own course with the confidence of a renaissance artist with an unlimited budget. ‘CHROMAKOPIA’ appears poised to be another bold step forward from an artist who’s never been interested in standing still, even when the ground beneath him was shaking.
Those masked figures in the desert might be walking into an explosion, but Tyler’s leading them there with the assurance of someone who knows exactly where he’s going – even if the rest of us won’t know until we arrive. There’s something thrilling about watching an artist refuse to play anything straight. All we have to do is wake up early enough to catch the show.
mxmtoon – liminal space
If you’ve ever found yourself wandering an empty shopping centre after hours – fluorescent lights humming overhead, escalators running for no one – you’ll understand exactly where mxmtoon’s head has been at lately. Her third album, ‘liminal space’, explores that peculiar feeling of being caught between destinations, of existing in life’s waiting rooms.
It’s a fitting metaphor for an artist who’s spent the last few years carefully reconstructing her relationship with both music and the online world that first embraced her. What emerges is her most emotionally hefty work yet, trading bedroom pop whimsy for something altogether more substantial.
Lead single ‘i hate texas’ might sound like typical post-breakup fare, but there’s a newfound maturity in its country-tinged production that suggests mxmtoon (aka Maia) is done playing it safe. Meanwhile, ‘the situation’ recruits Kero Kero Bonito’s Sarah Midori Perry for a deceptively bubbly take on society’s treatment of women as they age – think MUNA producing Mitski’s diary entries.
The heart of the record beats strongest in ‘now’s not the time’, a raw exploration of mother-daughter relationships that she almost didn’t play for her own mum. With contributions from Luna Li and a production approach that swaps ukuleles for banjos, ‘liminal space’ feels like both an ending and a beginning – appropriate for an album about existing in life’s in-between moments.
As she packs up her life to move to Nashville, Maia’s created a record that turns uncertainty into art. Sometimes, the most interesting places are the ones between where you’ve been and where you’re going.
The Cure – Songs of a Lost World
Sixteen years is a long time in pop music – entire genres have been born, died, and resurrected as nostalgic cash-ins since The Cure last graced us with a new album. Yet here’s Robert Smith, still rocking that backcombed beacon of hope, announcing their return with all the subtlety of a whisper in a hurricane: one poster outside one pub in Crawley, where it all began in 78. (Because when you’re The Cure, you don’t need billboards in Times Square – you just need to know where your heart lives.)
‘Songs of a Lost World’ emerges from the darkest of spaces – Smith’s personal cathedral of grief, built from the loss of both parents and his beloved brother Richard. It’s a reminder that while the eyeliner might be theatrical, the tears beneath it have always been real. The songs here have been marinating in melancholy for the better part of a decade, though you wouldn’t know it from their raw immediacy.
Between headlining Glastonbury (where they casually reminded everyone why they’re still alternative music’s heavyweight champions) and their aptly-named Shows of a Lost World tour, Smith’s been keeping that flame burning. And like all the best horror stories, this one comes with a sequel – or two – already brewing in those famously fertile gothic gardens of his mind.
Thus Love – All Pleasure
In a barn somewhere in the woods of Brattleboro, Vermont (which sounds like either the start of a great indie rock origin story or a very hip horror movie), Thus Love have been cooking up something rather special. Their sophomore album ‘All Pleasure’ feels less like a band changing and more like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, if said butterfly was really into effects pedals and existential contemplation.
Following the departure of bassist Nathaniel van Osdol post-‘Memorial’, the band hasn’t just filled gaps – they’ve expanded their sonic universe, adding bassist Ally Juleen and guitar/keyboard wizard Shane Blank to the mix.
Where their debut wrapped itself in the cosy blanket of chorus-soaked 80s psychedelia, ‘All Pleasure’ kicks down the door of genre constraints with stomping riffs and harmonies that feel like a conversation between parallel universes. Thus Love have transformed their barn-turned-studio into a laboratory of joy, where discussions of systemic oppression and authentic pleasure share space with guitar licks that could wake the dead (in a good way).
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