Best of 2025
Does Tyler, The Creator ever get tired? It’s a silly enough question at face value, but when you consider what the Los Angeles-hailing, Odd Future-founding, Golf Wang-world-building creative has given to culture over the past decade and a half—only to have ratcheted up that same output with the release of CHROMAKOPIA and DON’T TAP THE GLASS in under a year’s time—well, if rap were a sport, we’d be testing this guy for PEDs. His output through the end of 2025 did more than just reinforce his position as one of the most gifted creatives of his era. It confirmed him as a generational voice, an artist brave enough to follow the flight path of every musical great that preceded him, an MC and producer who will always zig when expected to zag, leaving the game better for it in the process. July gave us the surprise release of DON’T TAP THE GLASS, his ninth studio album, a conspicuously danceable acknowledgment of the old-school hip-hop aesthetics and timeless Black ingenuity he’d been absorbing since he first understood music to be one of his callings. The album was a purposeful “two-step” away from the highly emotional and sometimes rigid introspection of 2024’s CHROMAKOPIA, a project fans celebrated as his most personal to date. “I’m not saying it’s the most mature, deep shit—everyone has different lives—but for me, whether it’s me talking about my relationship with my hair and how that’s affected me, or me almost being a father last year, or, you know, the relationship that I have with my father now—just so many things that I’ve decided to dive deep into—after the way that got off, I just wanted to be silly again,” Tyler told Zane Lowe of his approach to DON’T TAP THE GLASS. “No deep album cuts, no slow emotional shit—I just wanna be fun and say outrageous shit and say inside jokes that me and my friends laugh at, and just talk big fly shit.” You would have both heard about and seen “big fly shit” in the video for DON’T TAP THE GLASS’s “Stop Playing With Me,” which features the cherry-red Ferrari F40 Tyler purchased this past June. If you caught him wheeling around LA in it, consider yourself lucky, as headlining slots at Governors Ball, Lollapalooza, Outside Lands, and Osheaga kept him tearing down stages the continent over. Which says nothing of the stage—and accompanying festival—he built himself, LA’s own Camp Flognaw, now in its 11th year. By the time we bid farewell to 2025, Tyler will have made his feature-film debut in Marty Supreme, the Josh Safdie-directed period drama about a table tennis wunderkind, played by Timothée Chalamet. One could posit that it would take similarly brilliant weirdo artists to draw a long-established musical great into his cinematic era, but the truth is that we only see Tyler when he wants us to. And as our Apple Music Artist of the Year for 2025, here’s hoping he ups it on us once again in ’26. Celebrate Tyler’s Artist of the Year appointment with a special selection of playlists dedicated to the songs and voices that have shaped the last 12 months.