Tyga Made an AI Album, Admitted It, and Got the First 0.0 Pitchfork Has Handed Out in 19 Years

On August 12, Pitchfork gave Tyga’s $TARFACE a 0.0 out of 10 – the outlet’s first zero score in nineteen years, since a 2007 Vice Records compilation called This Is Next: Indie’s Biggest Hits Volume 1. Reviewer Drew Millard didn’t hedge: “The rapper’s slop-pop concept album is smug and complacent and depressing. Its very existence has made the world a worse place,” and, on the record’s central genre conceit, “an amalgam of ’80s synth-pop and disco slapped together by someone who’s never cared to listen to one synth-pop or disco record.” A zero is a rare enough event that it would be this week’s story on its own. What makes it a real Terrible Tuesday subject, rather than just one critic’s brutal pull-quote, is that Tyga had already told everyone, on the record, exactly why the album sounds the way it does.

$TARFACE, released July 31 under Tyga’s “Starface” alter ego and built around an 1980s-synth-pop-and-disco concept referencing the 1983 film Scarface, arrived with Tyga having openly discussed using AI tools in its production. In a Vibe interview around the album’s release, he confirmed using Suno specifically to generate retro synthesizer textures and a guitar solo: “For sure,” he said when asked directly. “But we definitely used AI as a tool. And I know people are going to be mad about me saying this, but it’s where technology is going. It’s no different than when Auto-Tune came out.” After the Pitchfork score and the backlash that followed, he narrowed the claim rather than walking it back: “What I said was this: I used AI-assisted things in the production. All the vocals are me, I wrote all the songs. When it comes to the ’80s synths and the guitar solos, yes I used AI for that. But I didn’t make a full AI album.” Asked about the review itself, he offered: “I don’t really know what Pitchfork is. All I know is that the devil uses a pitchfork.”

That’s a meaningfully different situation than this site’s last AI-music controversy, Fenix Flexin’s “Rubberz”, which spent months denying AI involvement before admitting it under pressure. Tyga disclosed his process voluntarily, in his own words, before critics forced the issue. Disclosure is a real and separate virtue from quality, and Millard’s review doesn’t actually score the album down for using AI as a concept – it scores it down because the record, judged as a record, doesn’t work: generic in its genre execution, hollow in its concept, “smug and complacent” rather than experimental. Other reviews landed in the same neighborhood without matching the zero: Sputnikmusic gave it 0.5 out of 5, and RapReviews, while apparently declining to commit to a single number, wrote that “Tyga stopped giving a shit a long time ago, and technology has finally caught up to his apathy to create a perfect abomination.” Commercially, the record moved fewer than 2,000 album-equivalent units in its first week and didn’t chart on the Billboard 200 at all.

Doja Cat added a second layer to the story the same day the review dropped, calling Tyga “a penis for making an AI album” during a livestream – notable partly because the two have a real history, having collaborated on a “Juicy” remix in 2019 and “Freaky Deaky” in 2022, which makes this a former collaborator’s public break rather than an outsider’s dunk. Tyga’s response stayed almost affectionate despite the shot: “Listen, I love Doja, but she made a demonic album. But I still love her.”

None of that – the AI disclosure, the ex-collaborator’s insult, the memorable one-liners on both sides – is actually the disappointment here. The disappointment is a concept album that had a real hook (an established rapper going full 1980s synth-pop under an alter ego, honestly built with AI tools instead of hiding it) and simply didn’t deliver the execution the concept needed, according to nearly everyone who reviewed it, sympathetic or not. Tyga told the truth about how he made it and got a historic zero anyway, which is really the point: honesty about your process was never going to save a record that doesn’t work once you’re actually listening to it.