“Foreword” is Flower Boy’s opening track, featuring Rex Orange County and production from Tyler himself. What follows is a track-by-track guide into the creation of Flower Boy, a whirlwind of videos and images of the album’s creation and inspiration straight from the source: the Flower Boy Instagram.įlower Boy: The Track-by-Track Visual Guide Scrolling through the feed, Tyler’s fans could witness his usage of the Odd Future energy from within the studio, offering a glimpse into the focus, labor, and humorous community involved in his most polished offering so far. Months after the album’s release, Tyler publicly revealed an Instagram account that chronicled the creation of the album. Flower Boy offers an opportunity to consume the product and witness the creation first-hand. Tyler, the Creator’s Flower Boy InstagramĪs fans, our consumption of music is usually less intensive than the careful and laborious process of creating, and rarely do we get to see the strain of this work. A garden obsessively crafted and tended to produced the most rewarding flowers of Tyler’s career. Riotous calls to “kill people, burn shit, fuck school” ceded to energetic references to Teslas and McClarens as a medium to escape solitude. On Flower Boy, this familiar Odd Future energy resulted in the most complete work from a member not named Frank Ocean or Earl Sweatshirt. Their energy saw Tyler banned from countries and witnessed Earl’s exile to boarding school in Samoa, but they grew and matured. “DEATHCAMP” felt like a sudden burst of energy in hindsight packaging “DEATHCAMP” with “FUCKING YOUNG” in a music video was a way of testing the waters of what he could get away with.įrom the beginning, the Odd Future collective got away with a lot–but not without consequence. He had progressively smoothed the rough edges first assaulting ears on The Odd Future Tape Vol 1 back in 2008, but Cherry Bomb tracks such as “DEATHCAMP” seemed to erase the progress. Tyler’s previous album, 2015’s Cherry Bomb, was a proper introduction into a resoundingly adventurous Tyler Okonma, but its gestures felt overbearingly experimental. What made Flower Boy so immediately different from other Tyler projects was the way it harnessed the energy we expected while bottling it in a lush and diverse musical landscape. Hiding the metronome pacing the track was Tyler, the Creator, whose lyricism was sharp as ever, cultivating a garden of sounds promoting Rex Orange County’s moody timbre, a mid-track music break overflowing with Tyler’s thoughts, and an effortless transition into the Frank Ocean assisted “Where This Flower Blooms.” Never has an opening track been more aptly titled than this introduction. On first listen, something about Flower Boy was immediately endearing but unfamiliar-well maybe not immediately endearing, the “bitch, fuck” that opens the album isn’t necessarily inviting-and opening track “Foreword” encompassed this difference.
The result is an entirely new way to experience Tyler’s magnum opus. We went through the entire account, from top-to-bottom, to collect every single post that corresponds with any of the album’s 14 tracks. The account held hundreds of never-before-seen images and videos from the “Flower Boy” sessions, chronicling the album’s creation from its earliest stages. Tyler, the Creator is currently slated for several upcoming festivals, including Panorama Music Festival in New York on July 28th, Detroit Mo Pop Festival on July 30th and his own Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival in Los Angeles on October 28th and 29th.This past summer, Tyler, the Creator unveiled a secret Instagram account that he’d been hiding for years. The 14-song set will also house two covers, one that the rapper designed himself and one created by artist Eric White. Lonely.” The Gap Band was listed as one of the featured artists for the song on Spotify. According to Pitchfork, iTunes credits also reveal contributions from Lil Wayne (“Dropping Seeds”) and Estelle (“Garden Shed”) and Ocean is additionally credited on “Where This Flower Blooms.” “Foreword” lists members of the band Can as contributors and the Gap Band’s Raymond Calhoun is credited for the “Outstanding” interpolation used in “911 / Mr. Lonely” featuring Steve Lacy and Frank Ocean. The follow-up to 2015’s Cherry Bomb, his forthcoming LP includes the previously released “Who Dat Boy?” featuring A$AP Rocky and “911 / Mr. Tyler, the Creator has announced the release of his new album, Scum Fuck Flower Boy, which will be available on July 21st via Columbia Records.