Yung Lean Expanded the Definition of Emo Rap

When Swedish rapper Yung Lean’s 2013 breakout hit “Ginseng Strip 2002” dropped, most everyone wondered if he was kidding. From the video of a baby-faced Lean moving like a poorly programmed cyborg to the absurdist writing, the song played like a digitally devised cosmic horror. There was no telling then how influential the song would become, charting a new course for emo rap and launching the tragedy-laced career of a misunderstood genre pioneer.

“Ginseng Strip 2002” splits the difference between disconcerting and being a terminally interesting curio. It’s not exactly an emo rap song, skewing closely to Lil Peep’s 2015 “feelz,” another uncomfortably funny canonical entry for a genre pioneer—but it has many of emo’s stylistic signifiers, such as dallying, drug-infused vocal performances spliced between affirming attempts at straight rapping. It would become the modus operandi for Yung Lean’s entire persona in the early years, melding together morbid curiosity and utter disdain.

Lean began making mixtapes at age eleven in Sweden: “most of the songs sounded like we were trying to be Eminem.”1 His early released material was pastel-infused and psychedelic, with some forthcoming playfulness that turned into a series of partially panicked articles about what a white rapper from Sweden might mean for the future of hip-hop’s purity.2 On “Ginseng Strip 2002,” Lean splits into two halves, one obsessed with his sexual acumen, the other focused on the shining future of his singing.

For the raps themselves, like many of emo rap’s enduring heroes, Lean reaches into the pit of Lil Wayne’s style, coupled with purplish aesthetics. The added twist being Yung Lean, the Swedish Sad Boy also influenced by depressing 50 Cent songs and (again) Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” This lineage makes sense. It should have been a signifier Lean was a serious enough artist finding his way. But his early results were weak, to the point of being curiously unnerving at best and “creating unwitting caricatures of [his role models] and not much more,” at worst.3 It would take Lean a few years of constant recording, obsessive tweaking, and some abject tragedy to really come into his own as an emo rap icon—whether or not he intended to become one.

“I just work with my gut feeling,” Yung Lean told Pigeons & Planes in 2016. “I like keeping themes for songs and try not to get sidetracked by my influences. If I listen to too much Future or 21 Savage, I can hear them in my head when I’m rapping, so I try to get them away and I just find my own voice. I dunno, I guess my approach is Daniel Johnston mixed with a Lil Wayne.”

Lean—living and coping with bipolar disorder as Daniel Johnston did—saw himself in the work of the Houston indie musician. His biggest song may have been music in an Apple commercial, but Johnston was a prototypical bedroom act. Listening to his 1983 record, Hi, How Are You, there are parallels between the emotional chaos of that “unfinished album” and Lean’s disorganized early writing. There is delightful and uneasy surprise to Hi, How Are You, which relates back to Lean’s delivery on “Ginseng Strip 2002” and, later, “Kyoto.” It is relatively common for emo rap artists to pull from this flavor of influences, be it the late Juice WRLD’s infatuation with Warped Tour bands and classic rock, or Peep’s sprawling affection for punk. Still, to have Lean so immersed in obscure American touch points feels pure in spite of the results of his early releases. There is the sense Lean came to this music honestly and with a sense of wonder.

Yung Lean did not conjure his sound alone. His Sad Boys crew is equally responsible for expanding the potential of emo rap’s aural presence. In a 2014 interview with “Ginseng Strip 2002” producer and friend Gud, the Stockholm-based beatmaker rattles off touchpoints from death metal to psychedelic trance, which the young artist eventually began making himself in his early tweens.4 Similarly, in 2014, Sad Boys producer Yung Sherman revealed the almost comically simplistic origins of the crews’ name, citing placing “really sad” in his SoundCloud song titles as the catalyst.5

Later, in 2016, Drew Millard wrote of Gud’s relationship to Lean’s growth as a rapper for Noisey: “Gud’s beats played a big role in Lean’s hard-to-pin-down appeal, his lush, melodic instrumentals serving up a beguiling counterpoint to the rapper’s limited range.”6 Still, those early interviews with the Sad Boys had an air of rebellion to them—one moment with The FADER resulted in Sherman and Gud saying repeatedly that they were bored of Sweden. There was a restlessness to the boys that revealed itself in their music.

During Gud’s first-ever interview, he was posed a valuable question as to why a band of white kids from Sweden were invested so heavily in a uniquely Black artform, especially considering their flavor of rap clearly pulls from Southern hip-hop. Gud’s reply (“I have to admit that, at least for me, it started with A$AP Rocky”) speaks to the power of the internet in shaping taste and trends in the early 2010s, especially when “bored” teenagers are looking for an escape from their personal malaise. In the 2020 Yung Lean documentary, In My Head, Lean shares that he viewed the Yung Lean project as a place into which he could escape.

Returning to influences, Rocky, a Harlem rapper who was undeniably a student of DJ Screw and classic Houston soundscapes, helped bring those hazy Southern sensibilities to the forefront of the blog era—allowing them to become more and more globalized—and the New York mixtape scene. He, alongside Lil B and Clams Casino (who worked with Rocky on the classic LIVE.LOVE.A$AP mixtape), pioneered a sound commonly referred to as “cloud rap.” In 2021, Clams reflected on his work with Rocky: “I guess that ended up inspiring kids, who knew they could make something that moved the people without the need for a bunch of expensive studio equipment. It wasn’t about the quality anymore, but the feeling.”7 This feeling is what Lean siphoned and made distinctly emo rap.

Where A$AP Rocky was focused on swagger, using his music to elevate himself as the coolest person in the room, Lean’s work had an emphasis on being near-pathetic. Between his mixtape Unknown Death 2002 (2013) and his debut album Unknown Memory (2014), Lean meekly attempts to establish himself as something other than humorous. His odd jokes and discordant writing redefine what self-deprecation looks like for emo rap in the internet age.

Slug of Atmosphere spent 2002 lacerating himself on God Loves Ugly before critics could highlight his shortcomings. Lean presented a new challenge. His early works gave the floor to critics, giving them license to do the flogging for Lean who was still really sad on the tracks but in a more holistic way. Where early emo rap was less about a general mood and more focused on the writing, Lean created an emo atmosphere.

Unknown Memory was panned upon release. Still, there was something to the presence of the work. Lean and Sad Boys’ shameless-borrowing-bordering-on-copying of the cloud-rap style and blending it with accidental kitsch made for music that was just peculiar enough to warrant repeat listens. There is a moment in the video for lead single “Yoshi City,” produced by Gud, where Lean is walking alone through a dark mine shaft. It’s theatrical for sure, but there’s a chilliness to the scene. It feels as if Lean is about to brave the unknown world with no one by his side—though it only lasts a few moments before he is joined by his crew in a more traditional rap video setting. Even then, sitting on top of an expensive car with his friends, as Lean mimes the words, you can see him struggling to not burst out laughing.

The hook on “Yoshi City” is telling: “I’m a lonely clown, with my windows down.” The writing is emo as we’ve come to understand it in hip-hop by the 2010s, but also funny and deeply self-aware as Lean calls himself a clown over and over with his jokey affect. This imagery recalls Atmosphere’s long-running Sad Clown series, which dates back to 2000. There are attempts to come off as fly as A$AP Rocky’s persona, cruising with the windows down, but it’s near impossible to buy into Lean as anything other than kidding. His emotions are sincere, but his messy delivery recalls “Ginseng Strip” and the judgmental curiosity of, “Is this guy for real?” Lean’s execution is scattered, but the single is hard to shake. And that is to say nothing of Gud’s beat, which inspires pops of reddish color while managing to be cold and lonesome. The Sad Boys’ secret weapon was worldbuilding.

Lean’s entry into hip-hop’s consciousness was met with a fresh ire, but that did not deter him. Despite the critical hatred, success came quickly, and Yung Lean would soon find himself on the precipice of a complete, nearly irreversible breakdown. A 2016 feature with The FADER begins, “Yung Lean was in a mental hospital around this time last year.”8 In 2015, just two years after “Ginseng Strip 2002,” Jonatan Leandoer Håstad found himself in Miami, working on his third full-length album, Warlord, and heavily using a smattering of drugs from Xanax to cocaine to make daily life more manageable—but the highs eventually turned to intense bouts of paranoia and bloody, physical outbursts.

In My Head also focuses greatly on the wounds and aftermath of Miami, from Lean having a gruesome psychotic break to the tragic death of his US manager and friend Barron Machat in April of 2015. Following Lean’s hospitalization in 2015, he returned to the Swedish countryside for a few months, recovering with his family beside him. A bipolar diagnosis came after several manic episodes. Finally, according to his mother, the diagnosis provided a sense of relief—this could be treated, managed; there were options. And while In My Head is as close to the artist as any piece of media on Yung Lean out there, the greatest moment of the documentary comes when his mother, shown after a family meal Lean prepared, says that Yung Lean chose life—and came to understand that drugs were not what made him creative. The creativity came from within. In addition to adding a wrinkle to the texture of 2010s emo rap, Yung Lean also became a stand-in for what it might mean to overcome the darkest of demons. Few artists in the emo rap canon can be looked upon in this way, and Lean’s endurance and creativity is a credit to his fastidious commitment to his health.

As I write this, I am overwhelmed by gratitude to be able to remark on Yung Lean in the present tense. Lean has been on record saying he is grateful and lucky to be alive following the first two years of his fame, the rampant drug use, psychosis, and untreated bipolar disorder. All signs pointed towards Lean’s untimely end. To be able to regard him as a key player in the genre, as someone who survived the cruelty of the music industry and how it wrings out the sanity and health of its brightest stars, is incredible. During the closing narrative arc of In My Head, there is a scene in the countryside in which Lean, Sherman, and Gud are sitting outside and discussing the “rock star” life of their early days. Sherman appears reticent when asked if he recalls the damning past, but Lean appears lucid—he welcomes the lessons learned and is evidently proud to have not become a lesson himself.

Being a literal outsider to American rap traditions, Lean ultimately provided a fresh perspective with 2016’s Warlord, a deeply personal and overtly aggressive offering. The finished record (a demo version of the album was released, much to Lean’s displeasure, by his late US manager’s father) is intense and positions Yung Lean as a serious artist. These thirteen searing songs are underpinned by unfettered agony. They telegraph the future of emo rap as something potentially embroiled in electronic cacophony, borrowing heavily from that groundwork of Clams Casino and Lil B.

Lean’s soundstage felt brand new. Plotting Yung Lean on a genre timeline immediately became challenging as Warlord complicated the definition of Lean’s sound. From here, every Lean song felt like a daring question.

Lean’s production choices were—and remain—unique to his oeuvre, but his delivery was familiar as the years went on. Warlord was released just a few months after Lil Peep’s first defining work, LIVE FOREVER. While Peep’s ear skewed more goth, both young men had a similar untrained vocal style and penchant for addled, suicidal, and, at times, loosely confident speakers on their songs. It seemed the artists represented two sonic paths to follow: one glitchy and tonally abrasive, and the other more looming and dark.

Warlord was dark in its own right, between the harsh mental state Lean was in during recording, and his eventual his hospitalization. The crowning achievement on the album, the harrowing “Miami Ultras,” “was composed not in the studio but on the pier beyond it” during a full moon. On the cut, Lean sounds possessed by his very real demons. It feels as though the fabric of Lean’s psyche is being finely grated into dust. There’s a real sense of torment to “Miami Ultras” that was otherwise missing from emo rap in 2016—a close analog is the gothic spirit BONES embodies, but even so, his works didn’t feel as dire as the work Lean was putting into the world.

Within the differences between Yung Lean and Sad Boys, and other stalwarts like BONES and his TeamSESH collective, is an expanded definition of the genre. That is, Lean helped a new branch of emo rap erupt; he gave the genre a new body. Lean proved you could be a tortured emo practitioner and also be inventive and irreverent. He and his Sad Boys crew helped to establish a sect of emo that strayed from the pop-punkish and mall-goth energy dressing up the genre in the early and mid-2010s a la Lil Peep. Lean took the foundational grossness of Atmosphere records and turned it into a crumbly personal reckoning. In comparison to Unknown Memory, Warlord comes across as humorless and heavy. In comparison to “Ginseng Strip 2002,” “Miami Ultras” feels like a portal into a new world.

However, it is important to underscore that Lean’s best work came following his treatment. It would be all too easy to read into the arc of Yung Lean’s mental health and drug use and determine that good art can only come from abject suffering. Instead, as Lean proved by beginning the jonatan leandoer96 project, reflection is far more powerful for art than reaction.

Psychopath Ballads is a twenty-minute course of suffering and reflection on excess, as on “Never Again.” The straight rock song “Primal Fear” plays like a song out of time, like a Rites of Spring demo. Even the deceptively easy “Rockstar,” where he sings of being “caught up in the wind,” plays like a scrawling journal entry in which leandoer is trying to make sense of the mess of his present life. This side project under his given name expanded Lean’s ability to be creative and tender without having to touch the emotionally charged scope of the Yung Lean enterprise following the trauma of 2015. Giving himself creative outlets, allowing him to draw clear lines between Jonatan the person and Lean the character, demonstrated his recovery.

By 2017’s Stranger, released as Yung Lean, he had ascended as a songwriter. Lean was able to step away from the imaginative fantasy of his earlier works, take the darkness of his experiences, and create truly affecting music. It was less of a curiosity, but still unprecedented for emo rap. The two key songs on Stranger, “Red Bottom Sky,” perhaps his best vocal performance, and the killer “Agony,” are both poignant ballads. “Agony” stands as Lean’s most affecting song to date, an incredibly self-aware tune that tugs at the threads of psychiatric despair and reflects upon them with wisdom. The simple hook, “Isolation caved in,” paired with painfully honest writing about hallucinations makes this a soul-baring apex in Lean’s career. “It’s about being alone in a big marble house with white marble floors filled with burning golden candles and everything comes alive when you’re alone,” Lean shared with NPR.9

These songs still draw tears from crowds and Lean himself as he performs on festival stages. Even if Lean doesn’t regard himself as a leader in the emo rap scene, watching performance footage, seeing fans fly in from across the world to his show to ultimately cry their eyes out in the front row, speaks to the uniquely emo sensation of an artist belonging to their fans. Much like Lil Peep’s early concert footage accentuated the dissolution of performer and audience, Lean—at every level of his fame and career—appears to be one with his fans. At the least, that’s how the fans see things.

“I was definitely ahead of my time, but I don’t think I single-handedly changed the route of modern hip-hop,” Lean remarked in 2020.10 When asked about the larger emo rap scene, Yung Lean seems uncomfortable making sweeping statements. Perhaps this is humility or a desire to be as historically accurate as possible, or a mix of both. Lean’s uneasiness in celebrating his and his friends’ legacy is also indicative of how quickly music history moves in the internet age. Collectives, genres, subcultures, and -cores form and disband rapidly. People rush to cover scenes’ histories before the members of those movements even have a chance to identify themselves, what they’ve done, or what they’re hoping to accomplish. The anxiety of being first overtakes the importance of giving cultural oddities room to breathe.

Still, Lean’s impact is felt, and perhaps most visible in an emo rap artist like 6 Dogs, who came up through SoundCloud. The late 6 Dogs was a fervent fan of Yung Lean’s entire discography, with the earlier works and MGMT deep cuts influencing his final album, RONALD., completed before 6 Dogs’s passing but released posthumously. 6 Dogs’s eponymous debut tape has Lean’s fingerprints all over it. Lean’s impact is felt between 6 Dogs’s ear for curious production and the slight deadpan in his delivery, which is upended mid-song by melodic accents time and time again on the tape. “Faygo Dreams” is a gentler version of “Ginseng Strip 2002.” There is a softness to “Faygo Dreams,” a sense of overcoming: “I’m thankful for these scars.” While 6 Dogs was an artist with a clear and expansive vision, his roots in Lean’s school of emo rap tether him to a larger tradition.

“I realized, influence, it’s like a tree,” Lean said in October 2022.11 “It has all these roots. So a Soulja Boy song might be influenced from OJ da Juiceman and Gucci Mane, but when it comes out, it’s Soulja Boy’s way of thinking. Nothing really is made in a vacuum. You can look at black metal, and you know it comes from Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden. It’s just a Nordic version of it. I love music when you know that someone’s trying to do something, but it comes out the other way. Dizzee Rascal, he said it in an interview, he’s like, ‘I just wanted to sound like Three 6 Mafia.’ And Dizzee Rascal sounds completely different. I think it’s interesting to be open, and be like, yo, for what I’m doing right now, I’m listening to a lot of Prince. Obviously, it’s not going to sound like Prince, but still, it’s good to say what you’re inspired by. I think the best musicians always listen to a lot of music.”

Within this quote is perhaps the most interesting fact of Yung Lean’s presence in emo rap: he was a minor Houdini. His latest works in the early 2020s and late 2010s are much more interested in pop experimentation than they are in advancing emo rap into a new decade. Lean appeared suddenly, expanded the definition of emo rap with his friends, and, just as quickly, escaped into something new. It wasn’t exactly a pilfering of the genre; rather, Lean’s magic act spoke to the flow of influence in the digital age, how you can mean so much to a movement without intending to.

Lean’s got roots in emo rap—he planted them himself. But what has grown out of his early work is a series of wonderfully sideways projects, culminating in 2022’s Stardust, which is his most daring mixtape to date. On it, Lean heats, stretches, bends, and breaks apart conceptions of his prior work, while maintaining his distinct vocal signatures. The tape sees the once “lonely clown” establish himself beyond the otherwise nebulous idea of something more, rolling the putty of his early potential between his fingers, and ultimately throwing it out the window as he instead sculpts with fire.