Credit: Alamy

Every artist has to start somewhere, and if Goblin is considered a career low, things really aren’t that bad at all. Tyler, The Creator released his debut album on XL Recordings in 2011 at a time when his hype was at an all-time high.

Coming off the back of the viral ‘Yonkers’, there was plenty of weight on Tyler’s shoulders, but he had the talent to back it up with a whole project full of horrorcore while showing off his Odd Future family like Frank Ocean and Hodgy Beats.

Goblin was an instant hit, debuting at number five on the Billboard 200 with singles like ‘Sandwitches’ and ‘She’. Tyler produced most of the album himself and set the tone for the rest of his career, masterminding his own projects from that moment forward. He’s now nine albums deep into a catalogue that constantly goes against the grain.

Despite his first album being a success, Tyler now looks back at Goblin with criticism. He’s since improved as a musician and isn’t a fan of his instrumental choices or how his vocals sounded, going as far as considering it a bad album. Still, he’s aware that Goblin is way more than a timeless sound. It was about breaking new ground and the whole OF movement that came with it.

“Bro, Goblin is fucking terrible, but I still love it,” he told the Rap Radar Podcast. “It’s an energy and an aura that it has — hearing my wonky synths and gross drums and me not realising I’m yelling on every song and saying the most wild shit is what got people there. It’s not about the music. If you were there, that energy and that aura and that air just cutting through what everyone else was doing is so important.

“And there’s still some ones on there. I still think ‘Yonkers’ is awesome. ‘She’ is awesome. The first two versions of ‘Nightmare’ is ill. ‘Tron Cat’ is still awesome. ‘Analog’ is still cool. Like, there’s still a few things on there, but people don’t know, like, a lot of songs on that album were just random songs I recorded after ‘Goblin’ that we kind of just [viewed as], ‘Yeah, here, I got these songs.’”

This isn’t the only time Tyler has spoken badly about Goblin. He told WSJ Magazine that it was “trash” but had no regrets about recording the project. Looking back in the present day, he thinks it serves as a reflection of how far he’s come in his continued success.

“It’ll make the overall story sicker when I’m 43 and I own a billion-dollar company,” he said. “And it’s, like, ‘Look what I was doing when I was 19. Who would have thought those skate rats who like the colour pink would be doing this?’”

“My music got better. I asked myself, ‘Why do Kanye and Pharrell and Jay-Z respect me, but the people that respect them don’t fuck with my music?’ Well, maybe if I stop being funny on the internet, people will focus on my talent.”