A decade ago, before the words “Drain Gang” were ever uttered, Yung Lean and Bladee were the twin flames at the forefront of the Swedish Invasion. Despite the longevity of their creative relationship—and the fact that the collective has always seemed to prioritize their genuine friendships over business transactions—the duo has never actually released a full collaborative project until now. While both artists have flirted with guitar music and rock star aesthetics since their genesis, Psykos sincerely commits to an alt-rock and post-punk palette. More than a step forward, though, it’s also a look back: “Ten years, blood, sweat, and love, still standing tall,” as Lean sings on “Golden God.” Their sound in between genres is a natural byproduct of a life lived in-between, lost in the liminal transience of touring, shuffling from one hotel room and relationship to the next.
With last year’s Sugar World, Lean introduced his schmaltzy Thin White Duke era; here, he transforms into a version of himself closer to Ian Curtis or Robert Smith. It’s a fitting sound for an album that is in many ways about reckoning with the trauma of touring stardom—the titular declaration of “Golden God” inevitably suggests Almost Famous, another story about a precocious kid exposed to the pleasures and perils of rock’n’roll at far too young an age. On the anthemic blog-rock groove “Sold Out,” the pair sing not just about losing their childhoods, but completely destroying them: “I killed my youth/I watched it fall.”
If Psykos is an open-casket funeral for lost innocence, then opening “Coda” is a tender eulogy delivered at the service. So often, the cherubic Bladee has played the ethereal angel, but here he embodies a tempting devil, his crooning voice summoned once Lean says, “I hear God talking/But it’s overshadowed by El Diablo.” From that reflective intro onward, Psykos strips away almost any semblance of the trancey Eurotrash pastiche and lacquered hyper-pop gloss that this collective has become known for. In lieu of the ethereal gnosticism of Drain Gang is a kind of Zen nihilism that finds solace in the comforting stillness of a dark and empty void. When Bladee sings of making “the jump without wings” on “Still,” you can either take it as suicidal ideation, or a leap of faith.
Sometimes the effects-heavy guitar recalls Eno-produced U2 or Parachutes-era Coldplay, but woozier and more dissociative—probably the result of the counterintuitive cocktail of kratom and codeine that Lean claims to have been drinking regularly during recording sessions in Thailand. On the eerie “Still,” titanic cymbals crash into streaks of effects-heavy guitar, while “Things Happen” slips into a more intimate acoustic mode. Most of the overt hip-hop influence is stripped away, but Lean slips into a blunted rap flow on “Ghosts” as Bladee serenades him with circuitous loops, and their penchant for tight hooks lends itself to anthemic singalongs like “Sold Out.”
But it’s as much of an unplugged pivot for producer Palmistry, whose 2022 album TINKERBELL interspersed trance and 2-step with Dean Blunt-ish hypnagogia, alongside collaborator Silent$ky. The whole dissociative feel of Psykos belongs to Palmistry as well, whose struggles with psychosis during the album’s production informed its shape, most literally in the title, which Lean—also a survivor of psychosis—scrawled on the back of a leather jacket. In a recent conversation about the making of Psykos—as much a group therapy session as an interview, which Lean self-effacingly describes as “AA shit”—Lean gently teases his friend about his behavior during these episodes, not just from a place of love, but from a place of firsthand experience with schizophrenia. Lean compares the experience of enduring psychosis and coming out the other side to being a veteran traumatized by combat, fearful that your reality might snap at any moment: “If you’re in a war and your mind is safe, at least you know who the enemy is. If you're in a psychosis, your brain is the enemy. And that should be your best friend, that should be your home.”
In spite of the pain that fueled Psykos, the album is defined by resilience and triumph. After all the lightning strikes and near-death experiences, they owe it to themselves to take their own work seriously. With every release as solo artists and collaborators, there’s a greater intentionality and a heightened sense of focus to everything Lean and Bladee do, as they’ve not only found their voices, but found what they want to say with those voices. To have watched Lean and Bladee maturing over the years is to be reminded that every musician is not just a performer engaged in an ever-evolving creative process, but a human being often just trying to grow up, as the hard armor of life falls away to reveal the frightened child underneath.
