Jazz Cartier Fleurever Album Revisited

Sixteen Tracks, Named In Full

The album runs 16 tracks in 45 minutes 35 seconds: “Soul Searcher,” “Security,” “VVS” featuring KTOE, “Gliss,” “Function,” “Right Now” featuring KTOE, “Talk 2,” “IDWFIL,” “Sex Machina,” “Distractions,” “Godflower,” “Fencing with Flowers,” “Which One,” “Xrta Terrestrial,” “Before It’s Too Late” and “Tempted.” Four singles carried the long rollout: “Tempted” on January 6, 2017, “Right Now” on April 6, 2018, “Godflower” on May 18, 2018 and “Which One” on June 22, 2018. A deluxe edition followed on November 9, 2018, adding “Cuzzi Relax,” “Mitsubishi,” “Castlevania” and “No Way Out.”

The title comes from his own explanation to Billboard: “It comes from my nickname in French, which is fleur. Essentially, in my head, or in my world, it’s the flower that will live forever.” His second Billboard framing names the album’s engine as duality, the constant adjustment between who he was raised to be and what success was changing around him. That duality is sequenced into the tracklist, introspection at the top with “Soul Searcher,” club pressure in the middle, and the oldest single, “Tempted,” closing the standard edition like a reminder of where the campaign started.

A Toronto Production Bench

The house detail worth keeping is who made the record. HipHopCanada’s first-week report records that KTOE is the album’s only guest, appearing on “Right Now” and “VVS,” and also sits in the production credits alongside WondaGurl, Cuebeatz, Lantz, DZL, Daniel Worthy, 4th Pyramid and Krinny. XXL’s release coverage makes the same point from the artist’s side: he worked strictly with home-based producers for Fleurever, which is why he called the LP a big Toronto affair. For a major label debut from a Toronto rapper in 2018, that is a deliberate choice, betting that the city’s own bench, the same Lantz partnership that built his mixtapes, could carry a full studio album without importing a sound.

The numbers said the bet landed at home first. The album surpassed 20 million streams in its first week, and it debuted at number 70 on the Canadian Albums Chart. “Tempted,” the lead single, had already given him his first and highest charting single, peaking at number 91 on the Canadian Hot 100. The critics met the record as a step forward: Exclaim scored it 9 out of 10 and praised a cohesive tracklist from an artist in a different mind state, while NOW called it his most cohesive album to date, hooky flows and hard trap drums undercut by melodic melancholy. The three intimate Fleurever Yours shows that followed, Los Angeles on August 9, Toronto on August 16 and New York on August 18, kept the scale deliberately close rather than chasing arenas.

What The Album Proved

Fleurever arrived two years after Hotel Paranoia, the mixtape that won the 2017 Juno Award for Rap Recording of the Year, and it had to answer a harder question than a mixtape ever faces: whether the Jacuzzi La Fleur persona could hold a studio album’s length and a major label’s expectations at once. The answer in the record is structure. Almost 200 songs were made for the project before the final 16 were chosen, and the choosing favours cohesion over moments, one guest, one production family, and a title concept that ties the introspective songs to the turn-up songs instead of splitting them into two projects.

That cohesion is also why the album reads well as catalogue now. It is a Toronto record in its credits, its guest list and its breakout anthem, made at the moment the city’s rap infrastructure, its producers, its team and its labels, could plausibly claim to produce a complete major label album from inside the city. The mixtape that set it up is revisited in our return to Hotel Paranoia.

Released on July 27, 2018, Fleurever remains Jazz Cartier’s defining full-length: 16 tracks, one guest, a Toronto production bench, and a flower, by its author’s own definition, built to live forever.