Yung Lean
Stranger

Or maybe it would be better to say "first impressions" since the album was released a day ago, however, the "replay" button has been so heavily used by yours truly in the last few hours that I ended up wanting to talk a little about this character and, who knows, perhaps introduce you to a great artist "masked" (at least in the past) as a simple internet phenomenon.

Yung Lean is, first of all, one of the main forerunners of the SoundCloud music that has been so fashionable lately (just to give you an idea, some rappers initially tied only to the platform who now enjoy international fame like Lil Pump or XXXTentacion have taken much from the style and underground image of Lean and similar artists, who in turn took much from Lil B, but that's another story) and despite his young age (21 years) he went through a really rough three years: between 2014 and 2016, in fact, he had issues with various drugs, including Xanax and codeine, and consequently began to suffer from mental instability, ending up in rehab; during the same period, his friend and manager died in a car accident, further worsening his mental state. Around mid-2015 until 2016, his friends and producers Yung Gud and Yung Sherman managed to refine the sessions of the last album, finally creating a record with dark, industrial, and trap-inspired atmospheres, Warlord, which I highly recommend to you.

But Yung Lean's importance mainly lies in having outlined the sound of the so-called Cloud Rap back in 2013, taking after the style launched by ASAP Rocky and his producer Clams Casino, and placing it in a completely nonsense lo-fi context, with homemade videos full of effects that look like they came out of PowerPoint and a slow rap style that's decidedly far from technicality, often made more melodic with a touch of vocoder. Already starting from 2014 Yung Lean tried to shed the label of meme rapper by releasing another phenomenal album, Unknown Memory. Then follows the unfortunate story recounted above and the subsequent Warlord, an appearance in Frank Ocean's Blonde, and another mixtape, Frost God; then silence, until this September, when the first singles were released.

Today, on the brink of 2018, I can state that Yung Lean has released his best work: Stranger is a work completely devoid of any banger or aggressive sounds: it's an ethereal and dreamy album, with few drums (which is unusual for a rap product), perhaps the peak of Cloud Rap as far as production is concerned. Even though there's little or nothing of rap since Melody takes center stage. Lean's anguished vocalizations outline that emo rapper attitude that vaguely reminds of Drake (but without the inflated ego) that has always distinguished him; Yung Lean indeed has always had a melancholic/sad/dark approach, typical of the stricter Cloud rap (see Bones and Clams Casino) and in this album, the melancholic vein is no longer secondary, but becomes the protagonist of the atmosphere delineated in the album; Yung Lean and his producers Yung Gud and Sherman reach their artistic peak, reaching very high moments with Agony (and its piano will make you cry even if you're like the protagonists of Sons of Anarchy).

Having thus abandoned the dark period, Stranger does not represent the end of the nightmare, but the moment when the light at the end of the tunnel becomes ever closer: Stranger is a melancholic album, minimalistic in production which, with the enormous use of reverb and soft synths, seems made in space; it cannot be defined as a rap work nor pop or r'n'b, simply a mishmash, or rather a confusion of genres. That same confusion that fits perfectly in this period of insecurities and changes, a music industry that's slowly removing musical labels and mixing them as much as possible, resulting in inorganic albums rich in influences from completely different styles (see "More Life" by Drake or "Teenage Emotions" by Yachty); now stop reading this nonsense and go listen to it all.