In January of last year, Tyler, the Creator’s Igor won the Grammy Award for best rap album. Speaking to the press backstage, he expressed frustration at the narrow ways in which Black artists are celebrated at the Grammys, calling his nomination in the rap category, for a deeply musically diverse album, “a backhanded compliment.”

But the attention focused on that comment overshadowed what he’d said onstage when he received the award, which was that he was grateful for his fans’ support, because, he confessed, “I never fully felt accepted in rap.”

Blockaded on both sides, Tyler nevertheless emerged victorious, an acknowledgment of the sheer force of the vision he’d built for a decade as the de facto macher of the Odd Future crew. It was also a testament to the way he harnessed the power of the internet and built a vision from whole cloth, selling it to millions without much intersecting with the systems constructed to do that.

Still, the exclusions sting a little. And the boisterous, sometimes scabrous and persistently energetic Call Me if You Get Lost (Columbia) — currently the No. 1 album in the United States— is the logical rejoinder to both of those obstacles. It’s as thoroughgoing a rap album as Tyler has released — rarely has he been this keen to flaunt his bona fides. But it also demonstrates the pop potential of Tyler’s now-signature approach to hip-hop, the way his post-Pharrell embrace of chords and melody is in fact in conversation with 1960s pop, French chanson and acoustic soul and funk. A tauntingly good hip-hop album, or a rewiring of pop DNA: Call Me if You Get Lost has it both ways.

First, the bars. Part of the chasm separating Tyler from the rest of the genre (in perception, at least) is how he has in the past sometimes downplayed his lyrical skill in favour of musical experimentation. When he leans into rapping, as he does on this album, it’s still a refreshing jolt.

Mostly, he’s preoccupied with the lifestyle that success has afforded him, but even though the subject matter can be repetitive — there’s lots of Rolls-Royce mentions, lots of discussions of passports — he delivers them with the shock of the new. “Y’all don’t understand, fish so fresh that you could taste the sand,” he boasts on the lush Hot Wind Blows. On the gloomy and stomping Lumberjack, he emphasises the depth of his independence: “I own my companies full, told ’em to keep the loan.”

The album is structured in the manner of one of DJ Drama’s essential mid-2000s Gangsta Grillz mixtapes, with Drama himself barking over each track, weaving in between Tyler boasts. Tyler’s resuscitation of an aesthetic that was likely formative to him is both a calculated nod to the hip-hop community that couldn’t quite place him early in his career, and also a tweak to the puffed-chest energy of that era. The fricative juxtaposition of Drama shrieking “Gangsta Grizzzzillzzzz” while Tyler is speaking about keeping picnic blankets in the car — it’s both homage and disruption.

That’s how Tyler approaches his production here, too. Lumberjack is built on an ominous sample from the horrorcore pioneers Gravediggaz, and Wusyaname flirts with 1990s R&B with a sample from H-Town’s Back Seat (Wit No Sheets). Tyler is also eager to display how seamlessly he can integrate some of contemporary hip-hop’s signature vocalists, whether it’s the unrelentingly grimy 42 Dugg (Lemonhead) or the sweetly tragic YoungBoy Never Broke Again (Wusyaname). And he extracts startlingly good guest verses from his elders: Pharrell Williams (Juggernaut) and Lil Wayne (Hot Wind Blows).