Review: “CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST: The Estate Sale” is the End of an Era
Rapper and producer Tyler, The Creator surprised fans last month by adding eight new tracks to his 2021 album.
April 13, 2023
On Tuesday, March 28th, I got home from school and casually opened Instagram. I was greeted with a post from Tyler, The Creator titled “DOGTOOTH,” and I realized it was a new song. This stopped me in my tracks.
It’s been roughly two years since Tyler, The Creator has released an album, which is not unusual for him. He has put out projects on odd years, starting in 2009 with his debut mixtape Bastard, all the way to 2021 with his most recent album CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST.
As you can probably infer from the title, CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST: The Estate Sale is not a new album, but an add-on to his previous one. The Estate Sale is essentially an extra batch of tracks to be added to the track list of CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, also known as a deluxe album.
Some people may have been disappointed that The Estate Sale is not a whole new album. But, personally, I think the new songs are good enough to hold most fans over until the release of Tyler’s next full album.
The Estate Sale features eight tracks, all of them with DJ Drama yelling adlibs over them and hyping up Tyler, the same way he did on CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST. Here are my reviews of each song:
1: EVERYTHING MUST GO
This track is not an actual song. Instead, it’s essentially a thank you to everyone who came to the tour and performances in the CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST era, and an introduction to the batch of new tracks.
2: STUNTMAN
This is one of my favorite tracks from the new batch. It’s a nasty, braggadocious banger in which Tyler and Vince Staples trade bars over some bouncy drums.
3: WHAT A DAY
This song has a chill, smooth beat that samples Michal Urbaniak’s “A Day in the Park,” and some reflective raps from Tyler. Overall a good song.
4: WHARF TALK
This song is interesting. Seeing the ASAP rocky feature on the track list might make you think that it’s going to be a banger, but this is not the case. I still think it’s really good, though. It has a smooth and groovy guitar, with Tyler singing some nice harmonies. It gives me a lot of the same energy as Flower Boy, Tyler’s 2017 album. Personally I think the ASAP rocky feature is decent, but it’s so short that it’s almost a nonfactor. Overall, I really like this song, though.
5: DOGTOOTH
“DOGTOOTH” is the first song Tyler released from The Estate Sale, and I think it’s really good. It has a large piano background accompanied by some videogame-sounding synths, and Tyler makes references back to the earlier days of his career with the Odd Future collective in phrases like “that’s a lot of necklace,” and talking about his “daughter” Esmeralda.
6: HEAVEN TO ME
This song is one of the most touching songs of the bunch. It’s a grateful anthem with some vocals in the back, where Tyler reflects on his past and where he is now.
7: BOYFRIEND, GIRLFRIEND
YG feature: flashy, bright, and pretty singing.
8: SORRY, NOT SORRY
This is hands down my favorite song from The Estate Sale. It’s a very personal song, in which Tyler apologizes for a lot of things, and to people he felt he did wrong in some way throughout his life. He covers lots of bases, from talking about his past relationships to the environment.
This may be a stretch, but I feel like this song could have been influenced by Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, an album by Kendrick Lamar that was one of the most high-profile releases of 2022. Mr. Morale was an incredibly personal album where Lamar talked about the problems in his life in a very transparent and direct way. At a Converse All-Star Series panel, Tyler expressed his great admiration for Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers and the honesty it displayed.
His song “SORRY, NOT SORRY” shows a similar type of honesty. Also, the way that the instrumental is calm at first, with Tyler delivering his lines in a fairly calm tone, and then at certain points the instrumental builds up and Tyler’s delivery gets more and more passionate and aggressive, reminds me a lot of Lamar’s “Mother I Sober.” The general sentiment of “SORRY, NOT SORRY” is that, while Tyler says sorry for all his problems, he’s also “not sorry” because they’re either in the past or he can’t overextend himself to fix these problems. This reminds me a lot of Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers as well.
Finally, I like that this song was the last track on the deluxe, because it’s a good closer. At the end of the song, DJ Drama yells “I guarantee a new era is upon us!” In the music video for “SORRY, NOT SORRY,” we see a bare-bodied Tyler beating up another version of himself wearing a blue suit and blue hat, the outfit Tyler has worn throughout the CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST era. So I think it’s safe to say that The Estate Sale is the end of this era, and that a new era is coming soon.
Overall, CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST: The Estate Sale is a nice close to the CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST era. If Tyler keeps with his every-other-year release schedule, hopefully we will be getting a new album from him sometime this year.