In the past decade, Yung Lean has traveled well beyond the novelty-rap origins of “Ginseng Strip 2002,” moving from trance to 2-step to art pop. But he’s never really been able to escape the fact that he was first known to the world as a white 15-year-old making joke raps. The jonatan leandoer96 side project and its predecessor Jonatan Leandoer127 have, over the years, offered a respite from the baggage that comes with the name Yung Lean—not just his fans’ expectations for a certain type of rap music, but also the air of appropriation that colored the project’s origins. If Yung Lean had introduced himself to the world first as jonatan leandoer96, he might have been regarded more like the Swedish King Krule than the stepchild of Lil B. The double-edged irony of viral success is that without the meme appeal that initially built his audience, he wouldn’t have a built-in following for his subsequent wanderings, and would likely still be toiling in obscurity.
Though he used to keep his two projects siloed, Yung Lean and jonatan leandoer96 have increasingly converged as the respective experimentation of one inevitably feeds into the other; the haunted piano ballads and post-punk riffs of Yung Lean’s 2022 album Stardust fit snugly within the leandoer96 palette. While the first leandoer96 releases possessed the diaristic aimlessness of a sketchbook, his new record Sugar World is tightly produced and precisely programmed, marking both a confident step forward and a somewhat unexpected pivot for the artist, regardless of moniker. Here, Lean sounds less interested in hypnagogic pop than classic Britpop.
Lean benefits from the grounding presence of Danish multimedia artist Frederik Valentin, with whom he seems to have found an unexpected kinship. As one-fourth of the thumb-nosing butt-rock group Hard Rock Power Spray, Valentin experienced early success with his edgelord antics, opening tours for Green Day and Bloodhound Gang, joining the Warped Tour, and even releasing a concert-movie-cum-porno called Rock N Fuck. But time has a way of wearing down even the artists most invested in shock value, and Valentin seems to have matured into a respectable avant-garde polymath. Big riffs and dick jokes gave way to loops and reverb, adult film soundtracks swapped for Chris Marker live scores. However unexpected it might seem, the slightly elder Valentin offers a role model for Lean, as the rapper continues his own transition from adolescent transgressive to dignified auteur.
Though the leandoer96 project has grown in scope and confidence with each release, it has remained firmly in the bedroom until now; Sugar World drapes Lean in velvet and syrup, with a lush sound befitting the cornball crooner he plays on the album’s cover. The production is more melodic and uptempo than the sparse compositions and ambient soundscapes of Valentin’s recent years, but he’s nevertheless softened since his punk days, arriving at a singular combination of glam rock and indie twee. Lean has always had strong taste in collaborators, and like Gud and Sherman of the Sad Boys collective, Valentin fills out Lean’s aesthetic universe with textured shading, infusing Sugar World with the kind of whimsy Jon Brion brought to Late Registration.
The dissonant shapelessness and heavy reverb of 2016’s Psychopath Ballads mimicked Hippos in Tanks labelmates like Dean Blunt and James Ferraro, but Sugar World is more like the second coming of Jens Lekman. Polished arrangements replace the slapdash Garageband drafts that populated previous leandoer96 releases, and tracks unfold like miniature suites. At once hard rocking and sweetly melodramatic, Valentin’s treatment positions Lean as a Bowie or Bolan-esque figure, a chameleonic icon shifting into his blue-eyed soul period. “Nightmare Amusement Park” effortlessly glides from guitar-heavy power pop into a glistening symphony as Lean’s own voice oozes in and out of Auto-Tune. On “Open (Copenhagen Freestyle),” Lean is in pure piano-ballad mode, before a talkbox-like guitar joins in to duet.
There are still traces of a lo-fi sensibility—Valentin generally favors a simple drum machine over full percussion—but the freeform warblings of the leandoer96 project have been molded into a new shape. The jangly keys and sweeping strings of “Rivers of Another Town” channel Camera Obscura, and the clean lead guitar of “If I’m Born I Have to Live” has an echo of Phoenix. At other moments, Valentin and Lean flirt with a classic FM radio sound. The opening bars of “Nightmare Amusement Park” riff on Kiss’ “Strutter,” while the guitar solo on the title track blazes into “All the Young Dudes” territory.
Just as he once played the rapper, Lean has searched for new characters to embody, and here he summons his inner wedding singer. Abandoning his monotone rap flow, Lean stretches into the upper reaches of his register, the cracks and chokes of his unvarnished voice offering an evocative counterpoint to the blushing twinkle of Valentin’s production. On “Swedish Elvis Storm,” he reaches an angelic falsetto, swaying like a doo-wop crooner standing on a corner. Some of his lyrics still mimic rap bars—“When I was a young one/Got my head sprung”—but Lean’s writing conforms to pop structure more than ever, distilling it to a refined simplicity. There’s still an occasional clumsiness to the phrasing and delivery, but he’s learned to exploit that as a vehicle for an almost adorable earnestness, serenading the unseen lovers in his phone. Lean’s accented voice achieves a distinct emotional affect, where stumbling and half-uttered words stand in for a broken heart.
What skeptics misunderstand about Yung Lean is that his appeal was never solely about irony: It was about a kind of dissonance between the profanity and imperfection of Lean’s lyrics and the dreamy, frequently gorgeous production that served as a backdrop. Lean was always drawn in by the sublime, but he offset it with the juvenile deflection of a kid uncomfortable with sincere emotion. Over the last decade of his career, he’s struggled not only to be taken seriously by others, but to take himself seriously as a voice capable of making beautiful noise. With Sugar World, he finally lets all the sweetness and gentle feeling built up inside come tumbling out, stripped of any macho defense mechanisms. While it’s the kind of stylistic switch that might at first seem like another gimmick, Lean lets his heart bleed freely like never before.
