Alex G, Tyler, the Creator and Jessie Murph

"Headlights," "Don't Tap the Glass" and "Sex Hysteria"

Tyler, the Creator performs at the Coachella Stage during the 2024 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 13, 2024
"Don't Tap the Glass is Tyler, the Creator switching off the anxious side of his brain and allowing simple pleasures to guide him"
(Image credit: Arturo Holmes / Getty Images)

'Headlights' by Alex G

★★★

'Don't Tap the Glass' by Tyler, the Creator

★★★

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"Don't Tap the Glass is Tyler, the Creator switching off the anxious side of his brain and allowing simple pleasures to guide him," said David Renshaw in The Fader. A surprise release that arrives just 10 months after his chart-topping Chromakopia, the 10-track set aims to put bodies back on the dance floor and comes with Tyler explicitly demanding that it not be listened to while sitting still. "Traversing G-Funk, bouncy R&B, Miami bass, jungle, and everything in between," it's the Grammy winner's "most don't-overthink-it record in years." And "at a breezy 28 minutes," it's also his tightest. Despite its brevity, Don't Tap the Glass is another sign that Tyler is "on a generational roll right now," said Aaron Williams in Uproxx. Who else gets to play so fast and loose with release schedules? Or "so wildly experiment with sonics?" Veering from '80s L.A. freestyle on "Sugar on My Tongue" to "Zapp-like funk-R&B" on "Sucka Free," he has whipped up "a living museum of Black music from the past four decades." If only "more artists were allowed to be like Tyler, the Creator and just...create."

'Sex Hysteria' by Jessie Murph

★★★

Jessie Murph's sophomore album "has even more sass and swagger than her impressive 2024 debut," said Jem Aswad in Variety. A "precociously talented" singer and songwriter who sings with a twang but is "absolutely not a country artist," the 20-year-old from Alabama follows in Amy Winehouse's footsteps by making music steeped in the sound of 1950s and '60s torch singers and girl groups. At the same time, "the flow and attitude of hip-hop are so deep in her DNA" that even her sung verses "hit like rap lyrics." The "brooding" title track, a rock ballad, "doesn't just set the emotional tone for the album; it is the tone," said Caitlin Hall in Holler. While the album includes a top-20 hit in "Blue Strips," which feels like "post-apocalyptic country pop," many of Murph's new songs "wrestle with self-worth, heartbreak, and survival," and the title song "exposes the mess of needing someone who you know is bad for you, just to feel anything at all." Characteristically, "it doesn't try to resolve the hurt." It just sits with it, "which in Murph's world is sometimes more powerful."