Five minutes after Lil Peep and Lil Tracy met, they hatched plans to make music together. Peep told Tracy he had a verse open for him, and the song they recorded that day is a frenetic collision, excavating a tender beat from a Postal Service song and frothing over it with half-sung raps about switchblades and taking a girl home to “connect like WiFi.” It’s close to perfect. Tracy said later he had never connected like that with anyone. The two collaborated for a too-brief period, culminating in a bitter, public fall-out over Peep’s management and the way the media—and sometimes Peep himself—erased Tracy from the narrative around Gothboiclique and the rise of so-called “emo-rap.” They were barely speaking in 2017 when Peep died on a tour bus in Tucson, Arizona.
The posthumous Peep projects that have trickled out since then have been gifts to fans, shrapnels of his legacy. castles and CASTLES II, the pair of mixtapes Peep and Tracy put out on SoundCloud five years ago, are time capsules for their collaboration. Newly released on streaming for the first time, these songs capture the instinctive way their voices blend and break over each other. These are bleary tracks, with a ragged mesh of rock and rap and blaring, ticking drums. It’s scratchy and sludgy and woozy; it sounds like it’s seeping into you.
Peep and Tracy sang about rot and mess and entropy, destroying everything around you to mirror the chaos in your head. “I know that’s your favorite dress,” they drone, “Set fire to it.” The best songs here find a cinematic shimmer. Their voices echo and layer on “Your Favorite Dress,” trading verses while dark synths pool under them. “Lord why, lord why do I gotta wake up,” Peep moans in “White Wine,” as Tracy howls harmonies over a sputtering beat. The intensity is the point, and they braid cartoon imagery—castle walls and demons, full moons and bloody teeth—into songs about coke and comedowns and ache. “Two weeks with the same old jeans on,” Tracy coos on “Dying Out West,” “I know you want to die, baby, this is your theme song.”
But this is also the sound of friends having fun, riffing off each other’s ridiculousness. “I can’t fuck with you if we weren’t friends on MySpace,” Tracy slurs on “White Wine.” They ad-lib word associations, which veers into bland asides about fake friends and good girls, or a line that falls somewhere between serious and self-satire—“If I die today, you would try to fuck my bitch!” Tracy hisses on “Never Eat, Never Sleep.” You can hear them self-mythologizing, egging each other on; they keep calling themselves vampires, crafting something mystical out of sleepless, strung-out nights. The core of any Gothboiclique song is a plea, for peace or corrosion or a way to hollow out. Here, Peep and Tracy revel in their disarray.
When they first released these tapes, it was stunning to hear them wail about wanting to die, with an intimacy that bordered on boredom. They turned death into the mundane. It’s hard to disentangle any posthumous album from nostalgia and grief; it’s also tough to separate listening to Peep’s music now from the reason people turn to it, for the glint of recognition that comes when you hear him scream the worst thought you’ve ever had, crashing over drums. Peep could be transcendent in how he wrote about life and death and meaninglessness. “Look at the sky tonight, all of the stars have a reason,” he sang on 2015’s “Star Shopping,” so earnest you had to believe him. On these mixtapes, he and Tracy sing about pain and waiting to not wake up, but more than anything, they look for refuge, brick walls and barricades. It is an act of hope to build a space where you can be alone, to carve yourself a hiding place, and call it a castle.
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