The unifying principle of Taylor's work is rhythm: to stretch it, tighten it and work it like a muscle. “People call them nondescript rhythms,” he told Pitchfork in 2019 about the response to his music, “but in other cultures those rhythms are normal. If you listen to Middle Eastern music, they think about rhythm in a completely different way. It's not strange. They just got more of a groove.” Taylor, whose Ethiopian dad played congas with Earth, Wind and Fire, rarely leaves his beats in the same place he found them. “North Side” opens with a shimmering tongue-clicking ballad and Minecraft flickers as Taylor confesses that he “sold 15 of your swords” like they were prunes in an icebox. Halfway through, the track erupts into a booming Afrobeat and Taylor's croon shoots up and down simultaneously, shifting to a chipmunk squeak on one end, dropped an octave on the other. “I can feel it in the Wi-Fi all around me,” he thunders as the track explodes into a polyrhythmic maelstrom. You can feel the simulation malfunction.
Perhaps as a consequence of Taylor's interest in video game designempty space and its laws are as important to his songs as what fills it. Sparse, ringtone-like beeps set the scene for a trance-y drop into cyber-pop on “Focus,” while the growling “High Beams” creates a dynamic beat drawn from F1lthy's rage rap context, and then the it shoots further and further into the red. Even his calmest songs distort their surroundings in subtle ways: “Electrische” starts out as an accumulation of ruddering rhythms, until a bass pattern kicks in and the whole thing falls apart. When Taylor picks up the pace, it's with slow, cloudy chords that cast the track into a Basic Channel ether. It's as if he's no longer trying to catch the beats, but just floats between them.
Connecting all these scattered sounds is Taylor's own Auto-Tuned voice, which glides through his songs with R&B smoothness, waiting to rip. Although he occasionally lets it float sweetly, he often purposefully confuses his clean tone into something nastier. Halfway through “The Mad Hatter,” Taylor questions his own state of mind, melismatically declaring, “I'm not ready to say it out loud,” before his voice soars into the sky like a captured helium balloon. “Focus” ends with him speeding up his own vocal cuts until the sample sounds like it's being hyperventilated. Taylor treats his own breathy grunts and lateral vocal runs with the same grainy detail as the rest of his rubbery textures, blending glimmers of half-remembered moments from radio hits into a shimmering miasma.
