Songfacts®:

• "Ring Ring Ring" is Tyler, The Creator's funk-laced elegy to post-breakup yearning and that particularly modern kind of anguish that comes from watching your phone stay heartbreakingly silent.
• The sixth track on Don't Tap the Glass, "Ring Ring Ring" finds Tyler the Creator trading in the manic basslines of the album's earlier cuts for something more plaintive: a nostalgic stew of funk and house influences, garnished with a sample from Raydio's "All in the Way You Get Down" and a melodic nod to the 1985 R&B classic "Saturday Love" by Cherrelle & Alexander O'Neal.
• Tyler is no stranger to telephonic melancholy. Case in point is the second half of his 2017 Flower Boy album. In "Boredom," he pleads, "Ringy dingy dong, I can't be alone." In "911/Mr. Lonely," he flips the emergency hotline into a personal dating service, crooning, "Call me, my name is Lonely." And in "Glitter" Tyler leaves a voicemail for a love interest who never responds.
  
  "Ring Ring Ring" extends that motif into the 2020s, except now Tyler sounds less lovelorn teen and more man adrift in emotional quicksand. He knows he shouldn't call. He knows he's been told not to call. And yet... here we are. Ring ring ring. No answer.
• Tyler revealed on Hot 97 that the Don't Tap the Glass album title was originally the name he'd dreamed up for a never-quite-realized duo project with A$AP Rocky. "It never got used, So I thought it would be sick," he explained. "I just always had that title in the tuck and always just loved it."