It was easy, when he first emerged, to feel cynical about Yung Lean off name alone: a perfectly grating encapsulation of a certain early-2010s mode of irony that reconstituted hollowed-out rap tropes into winky Tumblr art. If Lean and his small crew of disillusioned Swedish teenagers hadn’t come up with the Sad Boys, inevitably someone else would have. My Twitter timeline, around the time “Ginseng Strip 2002” was blowing up, was filled with the same performative melancholy—sincere articulations of depression primed for external validation, or sometimes simply sadness as #aesthetic. Coupled with Lean’s tendency toward rap cliche word salad, it felt impossible to tell how seriously one was meant to take any of it. It wasn’t until later that I learned the real origin of Lean’s seemingly sardonic name, derived not from cool Internet rap but from his middle name, Jonatan Leandoer Håstad. The detail was funny in a sense—a man destined from birth to be a Cool Internet Rapper—and a bit symbolic too, a sign of something real behind the pose of it all.
The dialogue around Lean often felt more frustrating than the music: “Look how this Swedish teenager interprets hip-hop!” But Lean’s early releases rarely differentiated themselves from their source material enough to reward this curiosity, much less outweigh the baggage of a white rapper whose “outsider” status draws more attention than those who originated his style. More interesting than his “outsiderness” was his specific point of access: What kind of music do you make when Clams Casino is your DJ Premier? That premise, at least, seemed intriguing, even if the results usually made me feel jaded.
With Stranger—Lean’s third official album, and his best—it seems clear that the emphasis on Lean as “foreign rap interpreter” only did the 21-year old a disservice. “I don’t even know if I’m making hip-hop anymore,” he admitted in a recent interview. It’s an interesting statement in Lean’s case—if not a particularly unique one, generally—at a time when the current popular rap landscape sounds more like the Sad Boys than ever. But he’s right, in a sense: Lean’s rapping is, by a long shot, the least interesting part of his music. And the moments on Stranger where he breaks away from rap are striking glimpses of his full potential, piercing through the detachment that once obscured real emotion. In these moments, Lean’s identity shifts from something borrowed to something innate.
“Ice dropping, red bottom sky/Ice on my feet, I keep slipping,” Lean sing-songs on the chorus of “Red Bottom Sky,” his catchiest single to date. These are painterly lyrics—a bit evasive, maybe, but intense and world-building, closer in spirit to magical realism than the vacant randomness of his “iced-out Arizona Iced Tea” phase. And the way Lean sings them, especially, reminds me of Swedish indie pop of the mid-2000s like the Tough Alliance, CEO, and jj: bands whose blithe, Balearic sounds masked something unsettling beneath the surface, and who often weaved American cultural touchstones into their loose strands of thought in ways that were sometimes irritatingly twee, but sometimes transcendent. GUD’s production moves like a gentle tide, ebbing and flowing to create echoing pockets of empty space; the effect is somewhere between Boards of Canada, jj’s 2010 Kills tape, and Chief Keef.
The latter’s influence on Lean’s rapped and sung delivery here is hard to overstate (though the same could be said for 2017 rap in general), and tracks like “Drop It / Scooter” and “Push / Lost Weekend” are successful in the sense that they are capable Keef impressions. But even when Lean’s rapping falls short, Stranger’s breathtaking production from GUD, Yung Sherman, and White Armor holds the album together, albeit occasionally making me wish for instrumental versions (as with “Iceman,” a gorgeous, yearning beat that wouldn’t be at odds with elegant instrumental grime labels like Boxed or Gobstopper). Nevertheless, Lean presents well-crafted, transportive songs filled with clever, emo and pop-punk inspired bridges and outros that let the beat fade into nothingness.
But Lean saves Stranger’s most powerful, and promising, songs for the end, a one-two punch of raw emotion and no rapping whatsoever. “Agony” begins as little more than Lean accompanied by bleary piano; his plain-spoken imagery flickers with the quiet horror of gothic literature, infinitely more evocative than any of his percocet/molly/percocet cliches. “My window smiles in fright,” he sings shakily. “Isolation caved in/I adore you, sound of your skin.” And for just these last lines, he is backed by an Icelandic children’s choir in a breathtaking swell of quiet anguish. Finally, there is “Yellowman,” inspired according to Lean by the 1895 Robert W. Chambers story collection The King in Yellow—supernatural horror stories that circle around a play that causes madness in those who read it. Lean’s funereal chants drag, with resigned pathos, through Sigur Rós cinematics, sickly sirens, and fatalistic marching band snares. Lean, at some point, gets lost in the wall of sound. And still it feels like the most essential music of his career: no longer an outsider looking in, but an artist fully embodying himself.
