#25 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Tyler, The Creator
DON'T TAP THE GLASS by Tyler, The Creator
Tyler, The Creator, whose real name is Tyler Okonma, was likely the hardest working creator in the world in 20251. From February through September he played 96 arena shows in support of his phenomenal 2024 album CHROMAKOPIA (#12 last year) – a performance that had Tyler performing for nearly two hours solo on stage in front of audiences ranting from 12,000 to 75,000 people. During a break between one of the four 2025 legs of the tour (the fifth leg will be completed through March, 2026), he found the time to write, produce, record, and release the phenomenal DON’T TAP THE GLASS, his ninth studio album. As if that weren’t enough, towards the end of the year Okonma made his acting debut, alongside Timothée Chalamet, in Josh Safdie’s amazing period ping pong film Marty Supreme.
GLASS is a short 29 minutes long, but packed end-to-end with greatness, starting with the first song. “Big Poe,” written together with Pharrell Williams (who is also featured on the song as his alias Sk8brd – your guess is as good as mine as to what it means to be a cowriter as well as be featured on the song as one’s alias.) The song evokes LL Cool J of the early 90s, and heavily samples the song “Roked” from the Shye Ben Tzur / Johnny Greenwood / Rajasthan Express collaboration Junun (#10 in 2016).
The single “Sugar on My Tongue” (featured in the video above) is an electro hip hop groove at a fast 126 bpm that forces you to move no matter where you are. Okonma recently released a remix of the song that goes even harder: “Sugar on My Tongue (Freak Mix).” “Sucka Free,” whose chorus has the rapper catchily singing “I’m that guy, tryin’ to get my paper baby,” interpolates the freestyle rap he performed on top of Kendrick Lamar’s “Hey Now” (from last year’s #1 album, GNX) that Okonma released at the end of 2024. The fantastic video for “Stop Playing with Me” features LeBron James and the Clipse brothers, Pusha T and Malice, a clear tie back to Tyler’s recent appearance in the Clipse song “P.O.V.,” featured on their 2025 comeback album Let God Sort Em Out.
But wait, there’s more to Tyler, The Creator’s packed-to-the-gills 2025: he also released a new non-album single, on Christmas Day (the same day that Marty Supreme came out), called “Sag Harbor.” Like GLASS, it is well worth your time to check it out.
The entirety of DON’T TAP THE GLASS, along with this new song, all fit a “dance” motif, an intentional move by Tyler. The day the album came out, Okonma tweeted “more body movement,” paired with a manifesto for the album which ended with “This album was not made for sitting still, dancing driving running any type of movement is recommended to maybe understand the spirit of it. Only at at full volume.”
I’ve loved everything Tyler has made over the past few years, despite only really starting to pay attention to him when CHROMAKOPIA came out in 2024. I cannot wait to hear / see / feel what he does next.
1. Apple thinks so, too: in November 2025, Tyler, The Creator was announced as Apple Music’s Artist of the Year.↩
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