In a recent appearance on "Tavis Smiley", Smiley asked the now-24-year-old Tyler, the Creator to describe himself. He replied with a candid, perhaps-practiced monologue: "I’m very bright. I’m smart. I’m annoying and obnoxious. I’m very creative and borderline genius, and I think other people are starting to see that, too."

Cherry Bomb, Tyler’s fourth long-player and third official album, complements his self-professed characteristics to a T, in ways both good and bad. His greatest strength has always been world-building, using a synth-heavy blitz of candy-colored jazz chords taken straight (sometimes blatantly so) from the Pharrell handbook. Cherry Bomb isn’t exactly a hard left turn from this lane, but it is a quick swerve.

He’s still occasionally obnoxious and shockingly adolescent for someone almost a quarter-century old (on "Smuckers" he defiantly raps, "Fuck your loud pack, and fuck your Snapchat" with the gusto of Ian MacKaye declaring his devotion to straight edge). His idea of a joke is making the lead single to his rap album a Stevie Wonder-inspired bop about an underage relationship. What makes the joke "land," of course, is that the song is really good, a warm-sounding piece of pop music complete with an appearance from the ineffable Charlie Wilson. It’s a smart, annoying, obnoxious, creative, and borderline genius tactic from someone still working on reaching his final form.

The best thing Cherry Bomb has going for it is relative brevity. Goblin and Wolf were notoriously long, which felt like a betrayal of one of Tyler’s biggest strengths—shotgun blasts of creativity and anguish as opposed to woozy, multi-part dirges that bordered on self-parody. Cherry Bomb still features three songs that are longer than six minutes, but the songs transform within themselves, like the jazz Tyler admires, so that they almost feel like three songs in one. There's still nothing "minimalist" about what Tyler does; this tweet just about sums up his approach to this album.

Opener "Deathcamp" was allegedly inspired by the Stooges, and it sounds like what would happen if you put Tyler's idea of the Stooges on top of Glassjaw on top of Trash Talk, and, it should go without saying, on top a vintage N.E.R.D. production. Your mileage may vary, but I find it thrilling—the influence of rock music, while always present in Tyler’s music, is overwhelming here, which creates a Rebirth-ian wrinkle to an album that, to its strength and detriment, mostly recycles three or four similar ideas. "Pilot" and the title track to me recall none other than Big Black—drum machine-led walls of sound that break down and start up again as Tyler struggles to be heard over the noise. He is friends with Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bundick (who makes an anonymous appearance on filler track "Run"), and "Find Your Wings" is Tyler’s gentlest song to date, an interlude that’s part quiet storm, part Toro, and completely without pretense or sarcasm.

Kanye and Wayne have verses on "Smuckers", the album’s best song. All three artists are auteurs in their own right, and with Tyler’s verses bookending and sandwiching the track and a beat switch thrown in the middle, it’s as if he’s playing hot potato with rap’s most singular voices and inserting himself in their world, a vandal placing his imprimatur on a piece in a gallery. The thrilling part is how at home Kanye and Wayne sound having fun in this playground (Kanye’s "Richer than white people with black kids/ Scarier than black people with ideas" is an instant classic, while Wayne slides into a comfortable vintage flow).

There will be a lot of talk about how unfocused or chaotic this album is, but I’ve always taken that as par for the course with any Tyler music. Tyler is still gonna do Tyler things, and it’s refreshing when an artist creates exactly the kind of art they want to create. A quick glance at the announced five alternate covers to the album was revealing—there’s a real aesthetic consistency to them. I’m reminded of the work of Marilyn Minter, an artist with a similar panache for creating intentionally ugly and tacky art, with the knowing observation, "Yes, this is ugly, but I can’t stop looking at it." That may be old hat at this point, but the idea is still such a seductive one: I know it's a mess, I put a lot of work into creating this mess, and it's your problem if you can't handle it. A funhouse mirror doesn’t make sense without knowledge of how a regular mirror works. Tyler, the Creator only creates as the sum of his exhaustive, trying, kaleidoscope self—and I keep looking at him.