Cherry Bomb Revisited: Tyler, The Creator’s Explosive Artistic Evolution

Benjamin Kenyon

Music Journalist

Fresh off the success of his 2024 album Chromokopia, Tyler, The Creator is at a new high. While Tyler is in the middle of touring Chromokopia, his 2015 album Cherry Bomb is celebrating its 10th anniversary. In hindsight, the project stands out as a turning point in his already vast discography. It continues the maturation shown in 2013’s Wolf while still maintaining his trademark edge, albeit a more restrained version, as well as displaying artistic sensibilities that would lead him into a new stratosphere on 2017’s Flower Boy.  The album features a great deal of genres and collaborators. Production, as with most of Tyler’s work, is handled solely by Tyler himself. While the album has many tracks of the more abrasive style that Tyler rode to prominence, Cherry Bomb includes some of Tyler’s most romantic tracks, “2SEATER”, “F**KING YOUNG/ PERFECT” and “OKAGA, CA” to name a few.

The first standout track from Cherry Bomb comes in the form of “PILOT (feat. Sydney Bennett)”. “PILOT” centers around Tyler contemplating the newfound feelings stemming from his relatively new (at the time) fame. The song’s refrain and bridge stand out as one of the album’s lyrical highlights, “I don’t wanna crash anymore, I don’t wanna crash anymore” leading into the beautiful metaphor repeated on the bridge, “I’m in first class but I feel like coach.” Syd, fellow Odd Future member and lead singer of The Internet, provides vocals on the song’s bridge. “SMUCKERS (feat. Kanye West & Lil Wayne)” has one of Cherry Bomb’s best instrumentals. Kanye West and Lil Wayne both lay down some of the best verses of the latter halves of their respective careers on an instrumental that sounds reminiscent of Kanye’s own Late Registration. In the segment on “SMUCKERS” from Cherry Bomb The Documentary, Kanye and Wayne both smother praise on Tyler’s creative acumen, with West saying, “I’m glad you put that battery in my back man. That’s one of your jobs in hip-hop. I don’t think there would have been a Yeezus if it wasn’t for you.” Kanye’s verse features some of the best wordplay of his entire career, for example, “Richer than white people with black kids, Scarier than black people with ideas.”

The album’s best track is without a doubt “2SEATER (feat. Aaron Shaw, Samantha Nelson & Austin Feinstein). “2SEATER” highlights Tyler’s backpack rap proficiency, as well as his adeptness in the fields of singing and arranging. The song transitions seamlessly between Tyler’s verses, beautiful string sections recorded in legendary composer Hans Zimmer’s personal studio and the hidden section, its own song,  “HAIR BLOWS”. In this section, another highlight of the album, Tyler sings longingly to an anonymous woman in his passenger seat, “But I love it when your hair blows.” The rap verses on the song feel representative of Tyler’s catalogue up to this point in his career, while the string and singing sections play as sneak peeks of what would come to be on Flower Boy and Igor.

While Tyler’s albums post-Cherry Bomb may feel completer and more cohesive, the album holds much merit of its own. For one, it’s his first major foray into the other genres he would continue to explore on future projects. Tyler’s projects always find ways to build off of their predecessors, and it’ll be fascinating to see what direction he heads now, ten years after the album that forever altered his sound and career forever.