In February 2016, cloud rap pioneer Yung Lean released Warlord, his last album to use the online hip-hop style that originally earned him success. The half-industrial, half-heavenly record was recorded on the brink of a real-life meltdown; the substances Lean had rapped about so brazenly during his adolescent mixtape era would nearly claim his life. After reconciling with his demons, he moved away from cloud rap, and Warlord’s ominous, haze-filled crashout became one of the last great releases of the style’s golden era, alongside Bladee’s Eversince and Black Kray’s Soulja Luv Rari World. Cloud rap never disappeared, but the party was over.
Since 2023, smokedope2016 and his producers (bartesianwater and lilfittedcap) have presented an alternate timeline where cloud rap didn’t decline after the fabled “Summer ’16,” the year repped in the rapper’s Xbox Live gamertag-esque name. It’s easy to forget how quickly cloud rap’s contributions to hip-hop’s greater lexicon—its reverberated articulation of drug-fueled, internet-born debauchery through absurd and anxious lyricism; its moody EDM synths and hypnagogic sampling—gave way to mumble rap, emo rap, and subsequent records from Lean and his associates. But none of these matched cloud rap’s emotional luster. THE COMEDOWN caps smokedope’s recent trilogy of releases by supplying the one aspect sorely missed in his music to this point: the emotional vulnerability essential to cloud rap’s former magnificence.
Following 2024’s hungry THE COMEUP and the victory lap of 2025’s THE PEAK, THE COMEDOWN presents a cloud-rap fable à la Warlord: a lifestyle of druggy hedonism seemingly catching up to the rapper as he searches through clouds of divine vocal samples and sparkling synths to make sense of it. The album thrives on the same balance of adolescent naivete and angst that animates foundational cloud rap releases like Lean’s Unknown Death 2002 and Lil B’s 6 Kiss. Consider the intro and outro on “Banshee”: Bartesianwater’s gorgeous cast of pads first build to smokedope’s grand entrance, picking up right where THE PEAK ended (“This the winning team, gave up all my dreams”), but when he ultimately acknowledges mortality (“Don’t be sad when we die”), the heart-pounding beat fades into mist. On lilfittedcap’s subdued “Be My Zombie,” smokedope reluctantly concedes to the lifestyle trap (“I’m getting paid for having fun, but I still hate these ways”) while the synth lead croons like a mangled lullaby.
For every vice smokedope admits to, there’s an acknowledgement of its consequences—whether loud and obvious like on “Smoking Kills” (“Smoking kills, I still do it still”), or delivered with audible remorse like on “Lips Sealed” (“In the end I’m all alone, got these drugs up in my nose”). Being alone with these thoughts brings his narrative to some morbid places. On “My Chalice,” Smokedope luxuriates in a palace over a glistening arrangement of square-wave synths, but in that same palace, he makes a Lean-ian allusion to having drowned a “dead body” with “blue lips.”
The album’s slow and spacey final two tracks (not counting SoundCloud exclusive “Take Away the Gun”) reach a surprisingly honest resolution on vices that had seemed inescapable. Over washed-out vocal samples in “Lay My Body Down,” smokedope’s narration reaches a fever pitch: He can’t even finish his drink (“Sippin’ on some Crown like—”) without spiraling into paranoia and regret. “That boy was askin’ for it,” he says of himself on “Closing Time,” just one of the candid self-critiques here: “I’m privileged, grew up nice, fucked it up, did dumb shit”; “Fucked up my life when I signed a fuckin’ deal.” When the dust settles, he’s just happy he “made it through the comedown.” Even in smokedope’s world, where cloud rap’s misty run continued long after 2016, the end of THE COMEDOWN signals a rebirth akin to Lean’s after Warlord—an end to the endless party, a chance for new beginnings. “I’m past cloud rap,” smokedope posted this week. “Way higher.” Who knows what might lie above those clouds; right now, there’s no denying how good it feels to float through them with a fresh face.
