Yung Lean moaned so Lil Xan could mumble. With his sad-boy aesthetic, the Swedish cloud-rap pioneer set the stage for all the polarizing, Very Online baby-faced white rappers to follow in his wake. (“I thought it was funny, a 16-year-old kid rapping about coke,” he said recently.) But Yung Lean’s music has rarely served as anything more than a bridge for other rappers to advance across. “Yeah, I’m only 23 but there’s like, like, ten of me,” he raps on his new album Starz, not just a flex of his pedigree but an unwitting critique of how easy his stuff is to replicate. Lean deserves a lot of credit for being ahead of his time, but to paraphrase Drake, it isn’t about who does it first, it’s about who does it right, and on Starz, his methods seem outmoded and nondescript.
The sounds Lean helped popularize are better off in the more capable hands of his Drain Gang collaborators, especially Bladee and Ecco2k, who push the music well beyond his limits on recent projects. Many other rappers have taken bits of the Sad Boys style and scurried off in so many different directions it’s hard to do a head count, but several of them did something more worthwhile with it. Lean, for his part, has remained largely static. Even as he’s become more comfortable with himself, there’s still an emptiness to his music that makes it seem uninhabited. Starz feels like an abandoned promotional website for a tentpole blockbuster: A snapshot of a bygone little kingdom unto itself, standing still, oblivious to the world that has passed it by.
On 2017’s Stranger, Lean polished his songcraft a bit, and he stopped turning sadness into a meme and started reckoning with it. “Red Bottom Sky” showed his pop chops, and “Yellowman” teased the offbeat experimental musician he could potentially grow into. Sadly, the songs on Starz don’t really move in either direction. He’s still largely plagued by the same issues that hampered him in 2013: His boasting isn’t just inauthentic, it’s boring, and glimpses of real, genuine emotion are far too rare. On Starz, it’s easy to imagine most of the songs being better if someone else were performing, or if no one was performing at all.
The music’s punch and pathos come from producer and frequent collaborator whitearmor. His icy electronics make Lean’s one-dimensional performances seem stereoscopic. The erupting synths on “Violence” nearly blot out the stains of Lean’s expressionless rapping: “Put the money in motion, I pull strings, Geppetto,” he says, sounding more like the puppet that has yet to become a real boy. The crystalline arpeggios on “Acid at 7/11” aren’t enough to salvage the amelodic chants or the song’s fleeting moment of introspection (“I sold my soul when I was very young/I’m so gone”). Lean has talked before about the titular harrowing incident in Canada, seeing a man crack his skull open at the convenience store while he was high on LSD, describing it as the worst drug experience of his life, but that isn’t the song he wrote. Too many of his songs operate in this way—as approximations of episodes that never quite articulate the feeling.
The rapping on Starz, if it can even be called that, is utterly devoid of character. Lean regresses into bad habits, disappearing into empty flexing. “Pikachu” is the most explicit “Young Thug did it better” moment, and on songs like “Hellraiser” and “Iceheart,” Lean’s mentions of brands feel like product placement. There are flashes of evocative writing buried deep. “My dreams are in heaven, I won’t sell you them/Yeah, I lost a friend but we will meet again,” he raps on “Low.” He has a painterly way with melancholic imagery when he bothers: “Blood writings on the moon paint the sky/Living is whatever, I know what it feels to die,” he raps on “Sunset Sunrise.” But most of the time, he doesn’t bother, and whole stretches of the tape pass by without evoking a single identifiable emotion.
Yung Lean is most tolerable on Starz when his songs play into the surrealism. On the yappy “Dogboy” and the crooned “Boylife in EU,” his oddball personality jumps out. The closer, “Put Me in the Spell” is closer to the Fray than any rap song, and while his singing is strained and incompetent, at least he’s going for it. Too much of the album seems satisfied with the small space Lean was able to carve out for himself.
