Tyler, The Creator released his album IGOR on May 17, 2019, through Columbia Records. This tyler the creator igor essential tracks earfquake guide revisits a 12 track, 39 minute record that he wrote, produced and arranged entirely himself.
IGOR debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 165,000 album equivalent units, Tyler first chart topping album. It later won Best Rap Album at the 2020 Grammy Awards, his first Grammy win, even though the record itself leans further into soul, funk and pop than into rap.
Tyler IGOR Essential Tracks Earfquake: The Story In Order
IGOR follows a love triangle from infatuation to collapse, and the sequencing is the storytelling. Igors Theme opens with a heavy synth pulse and a Lil Uzi Vert appearance. Earfquake, the album only single, pairs Tyler with uncredited vocals from Playboi Carti and background vocals from Charlie Wilson and Jessy Wilson, and it reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, his highest charting single at that point. I Think, with Solange, keeps the early rush going. Then the record darkens: Running Out Of Time, New Magic Wand and A Boy Is A Gun trace jealousy and obsession, while Puppet, with Kanye West, slows into dependence.
The Earfquake video, self directed and released the same day as the album, casts Tracee Ellis Ross as a talk show host and Tyler as the Igor character in a blue suit and blond wig, performing until the set catches fire. The closing run resolves the story: Whats Good is the last burst of aggression, Gone Gone Thank You pivots to gratitude, I Dont Love You Anymore admits defeat, and Are We Still Friends, with Pharrell Williams, asks the title question over a soul sample and leaves it unanswered.
Do not go into this expecting a rap album. Do not go into this expecting any album. Just go, jump into it.
Tyler posted that listening note just before release, asking for a first play with no skips, no phone and full volume. It was practical advice, not marketing: IGOR songs bleed into each other, motifs return in new keys, and the short runtime means a distracted listen misses the arc entirely.
How IGOR Was Made
Recording ran between 2017 and 2019 in California, Atlanta and Lake Como, Italy, following Flower Boy. Tyler handled all production himself, building tracks from synthesizers, drum breaks and soul samples, and pitching his own voice up and down to play different emotional registers. One widely told detail shows his confidence in the material: Earfquake was first written with Justin Bieber in mind and was also offered to Rihanna before Tyler kept his own raw vocal on it. The guest list is mostly hidden in the mix, with Jerrod Carmichael narrating, Santigold and Jack White among the additional contributors, and the credits rewarding a close look.
The Grammy win came with a famous caveat. Accepting Best Rap Album in January 2020, Tyler thanked the Academy backstage while questioning why genre bending work by artists who look like him gets placed in rap and urban categories instead of pop. That tension is part of the album legacy: IGOR succeeded inside a category its maker felt was too small for it. For his later chart run, see Tyler, The Creator Dont Tap The Glass Debuts Big, and for another album built as a single emotional statement, SZA Drew Barrymore Music Video points back to the Ctrl era.
How To Listen Now
Follow the instruction on the tin: one sitting, front to back, loud. At under 40 minutes IGOR is the shortest album in this whole deep dive series, and the tightest. Earfquake is the entry point, A Boy Is A Gun is the production peak, and Are We Still Friends is the track listeners return to most. Played in sequence, IGOR still feels like a single piece of theatre, which is exactly what its maker asked for in 2019.
The physical and visual presentation matched the music. Tyler performed the album in a May 2019 Apple Music live special, released that August as a video album of the first IGOR performance, and the blonde wig and pastel suits from the Earfquake video became the era uniform across the tour that followed. Every visual was self directed, keeping the album world unusually consistent for a major label release.
