Was 2025 Tyler, The Creator’s Greatest Pop Star Year Yet?

This podcast episode is part of the Billboard editorial staff’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 list. Find our accompanying Tyler essay here, and all the rest of our essays and podcasts related to the list here.

Tyler, The Creator had a big enough 2024 to end up an honorable mention on our Greatest Pop Stars Honorable Mentions list that year, with his October release Chromakopia landing the best first-week numbers of his career and spawning multiple top 10 Hot 100 hits, including his first long-lasting rap radio hit “Sticky.” But rather than spend 2025 basking in the afterglow of that success, Tyler just kept pushing forward last year, with a dancefloor-oriented semi-surprise new album, one of the year’s biggest tours and even a feature film debut in one of the year’s biggest movies.

This Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 episode of the Greatest Pop Stars podcast looks at how Tyler, The Creator ended up at No. 10 on our list — his first time making the top 10 — thanks to an impressively full year where he really decided to just go for it. (You can find Eric Renner Brown’s essay on Tyler’s full-speed-ahead season here.) Kyle Denis joins host Andrew Unterberger to relive the surprisingly robust glories of his 2025, and explain how he really proved his pop star mettle by seizing the momentum and the moment and continuing to scale new heights as one of the defining artists of his generation.

While doing so, we ask all the most pressing questions about Tyler’s 2025: Can we actually hear Lola Young on “Like Him”? Could we have maybe used a couple more obvious dance songs on Don’t Tap the Glass? How exactly did that album end up in the alternative category at the Grammys? Were we able to separate Tyler from his cabbie character in Marty Supreme? What pop collaborator should he team up with in 2026? And perhaps most importantly: Is there any pop star who’s career we’d rather have right now than Tyler, The Creator’s?