Call Me If You Get Lost is released

Why it matters

Call Me If You Get Lost came out June 25, 2021, on Columbia. It is Tyler, the Creator's seventh album. The conceit is a DJ Drama-hosted mixtape: DJ Drama, the Atlanta mixtape host who had built the Gangsta Grillz series in the 2000s, narrates ad-libs across the full album in his Gangsta-Grillz call-out register. The combination of Tyler's by-2021 fully matured production-and-writing voice with the DJ Drama mixtape-narration overlay is one of the more inventive structural choices in late-pandemic-era major-label rap. The album won the 2022 Best Rap Album Grammy, making Tyler the second artist after Eminem to win the category in consecutive eligibility cycles. "WUSYANAME" with YoungBoy Never Broke Again, "LUMBERJACK," "CORSO," "SWEET / I THOUGHT YOU WANTED TO DANCE," "WILSHIRE." The album is the third in Tyler's three-album maturity arc (Flower Boy, IGOR, Call Me If You Get Lost). Across those three records he has consolidated into one of the most distinctive auteurs in commercial rap. You should hear all three in order. The arc is the part.