AIME and Boss blend crisp musicianship and decisive language to construct a world as depraved and challenging as it is jubilant, florid and teeming with heavy bass. Flowers Started Dying Yesterday is an intriguing identifier for an equally succinct body of work in which the title, songs and themes are interchangeable mile markers that chronicle AIME’s journey to the most self-contained, confident and complete version of himself. An aesthetic risk even for a rapper accustomed to shelling out high-quality conceptual releases, Flowers Started Dying Yesterday is a sharp pivot from the massive arrangements and original scoring of AIME’s established oeuvre. Opening with “Flowers,” the record juxtaposes the tender melodic structure of a love song with the brevity of life as AIME revisits the desire to succeed that connects all of his releases. He and Boss dabble in psychedelics and prove a quick study in Afrobeat with an impressive display of lyrical and rhythmic showmanship on “Started” (Pt. 1 & 2). AIME finds unbridled joy in the frenetic cadences and weaponized adlibs of trap music on “Dying. “Yesterday” leans into the language of reconciliation and finds AIME making an explicit statement of pride in his origins, as an MC and Haitian American. It is a future forward epilogue that trades in aspiration and signals AIME’s formal arrival over a flip of Maxwell Swan’s “If Only.”