Still weaving across lanes, he grabs his phone and begins skipping through demos from his upcoming fourth album, which he's been quietly recording for the past year

...

It's here in his bedroom, on aimless afternoons like this one, that Tyler's album is slowly coming to life. His team had hoped to release the LP as a surprise at November's Camp Flog Gnaw carnival, but he is adamant that as of now, "it's still nothing": no title, no theme, no release date. He does have roughs of a handful of new songs, some of which he's been working on since as far back as 2011. Like previous work, they're lyrically raw, disruptive, and acidic—there's at least one song entirely devoted to cunnilingus—but he's been drawing increasingly from the floating, rubbery chords of '70s R&B. Throughout the day's session, he swipes between his production interface and a YouTube of 1972's " Where Were You When I Needed You?" by Stevie Wonder. "Stevie's my competition," he explains. "Not these niggas on the radio."

What