Flwr Chyld’s ‘InsydeOut’ is a Rangy yet Honed Display of his Ever Expanding Skillset and Assuredness in his Sound
Evan Dale | December 18, 2025
Flwr Chyld has always thrived in the sonic spaces in between. The Atlanta-rooted, Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, songwriter, and vocalist who seamlessly tethers the digital to the analogue, has spent the better part of the last decade gliding through indefinability. Stylistically, his soundscape bridges Neo-Soul, Jazz, Funk, Hip-Hop, R&B, and sometimes far beyond. Epochally, he burrows into the best of times his selective stylings have to offer, transporting his music – and subsequently his listeners – to a whirlwind of stylized time stamps all brought into modernity by his studied, steady hand.
Though a consummate collaborator – always contributing to his friends’ and guests’ musical pathways from every angle and from beginning to end – he’s been prolific as a solo artist since his 2019 debut, Iridescent Luv. 2020’s Flow thrived in its digital funk production, laying the foundation for the smooth sounds of vocalists like Elujay, Emmavie, and Mia Gladstone to bring their soulful, romantic musings somewhere new. 2022’s LUV N CHAOS delved deeper towards the timelessness of analogue instrumentation, setting the tone for Flwr Chyld to carry forward the torch as more than a great beatmaker, but an instrumentally rooted composer. The album blossomed again as a funk-first exhibition of his instrumental and productive breadth, while simultaneously folding in a more confident approach to play with his own vocal range. By the time Café Noir – his collaborative, conceptual journey alongside longtime friend and collaborator, Grimm Lynn – came into focus in 2024, Flwr Chyld’s reputation as a well-rounded musician, progressively carving his own amalgam take on so many influences, nuances, and skillsets, was quickly becoming solidified. Since the beginning, he’s always had a signature sound – a Flwr Chyld track feels as though it couldn’t have come from anyone else in the modern musical landscape – and with each project, that signature becomes even clearer, while his stylistic and epochal definitions become more opaque.
With the release of InsydeOut, he’s reinforcing his auditory aesthetic, while widening its expanse at the same time. The November album – his fourth solo and fifth total full-length project since 2019 – is his most dynamic effort yet, weaving in the sounds and stylings from an even larger swath of collaborative names than with any collection prior. Alongside so many co-stars – some vocalists, some rappers; some established names, others still emerging – his own additions to the soundscape he’s forging have grown, too.
InsydeOut opens with PureTemptation, enveloping a listener in the inviting carousel of psychedelic jazz and the guiding hand of a narrator easing our ear – and subsequently our mind – out of the world we know, and into the sonically fanciful one that Flwr Chyld is laying at our feet. It’s not a new strategy from this protagonist, to construct a yellow brick road of musical immersion at an album’s jumping off point. Café Noir, after all, was from its very onset rooted in the idea of dipping its listeners into a conceptual third space and urging them to flow through an ensuing rollercoaster of emotions. With that same tactic at play here, InsydeOut captures the whole of its audience’s attention from the start. For forty minutes, there are no rules of genre, no rigid constraints of era, simply a funky, soulful, and timeless mosaic.
As funky bass slaps its way into frame at the album’s second cut, BitterSweet, InsydeOut finds its stride. The groovy bassline is made lighter by the honied vocals of Malaya who slips and slides her way across the beat with a crystalline register and rhythmic unpredictability. Legendary soulstress, Kadhja Bonet brings her own silky-smooth vocals to Flwr Chyld’s flute-led myriad of instrumentation on ForeverNear. The track quickly becomes a display of both artists’ adept knack for the undying emotionality of R&B roots. Mack Keane plays a similar role at PerfectImperfections, once again allowing Flwr Chyld to drift untethered to any one expected sound, but rather wherever the flow of his stylized jam session composition takes any given track.
On MoodRing – which folds Brooklyn by way of Birmingham poetic force for uncut, experimental hip-hop purity, Pink Siifu into Flwr Chyld’s reunion with dynamic force of his own, Grimm Lynn – the sanctity of defined genre is given its biggest test. Deep layers of instrumentation, production, vocals, and raps waterfall overtop one another with abandon, emerging as a composition worthy of Flwr Chyld’s immense experimentation throughout his journey to date, culminating in something though amalgam in its scope, still coalescing and true to listeners of so many sonic spaces from which he pulls his influences.
The whole of InsydeOut thrives in Flwr Chyld’s continued evolution away from any one space he’s explored, and rather towards the knitwear of how all his stylistic nuances work together when guided by his ever-sharpening skillset and bolstered by his ever-expanding collection of friends. And even solo – as heard at the album’s titular track – Flwr Chyld continues to grow as an instrumentalist and as a composer, and most of all as a vocalist.
From beginning to end of InsydeOut, there is no current artist is as dynamic, expansive, or as sure of their unique sound. And if the album isn’t somehow a deep enough dive for fans into the mind of Flwr Chyld, it also unfolds audiovisually as a piecemeal sum of narrative film under the same name. In his own words and in words that capture InsydeOut’s ethos,
A film capturing the nuances of situationships, relationships, intimacies, and almosts.
The undefined space between connectivity and uncertainty.
