Music
The new collaborative album from cult Swedish rappers Bladee and Yung Lean, Psykos, is bleak but endlessly fascinating. By Shaad D’Souza.
Bladee and Yung Lean’s Psykos
One of the single most euphoric moments of my life occurred in June 2022, in Barcelona. I was at a club called Razzmatazz, surrounded by 1900 pallid, self-consciously fashionable teenagers and 20-somethings, watching four rappers – Swedes Yung Lean, Bladee and Ecco2k, and the Thai rapper Thaiboy Digital – unite for what felt like a truly monumental display of star power. Performing “SummerTime Blood”, a collaboration from Yung Lean’s 2022 mixtape Stardust, the four musicians bounced around the stage, basking in the adoration of the crowd. The room was packed: for the previous two hours, the four had been running through dozens of electrifying, tightly constructed hits, the fans hanging on every word, as the mercury climbed high enough to match the sweltering summer evening outside.
It felt like the kind of performance that should have closed out the main stage of a festival: rich with charisma, emotionally resonant, head-spinningly fun, it was a far sharper set than those that usually serve as headline performances. The only problem was few mainstream music festival patrons would have ever even heard of them. Bladee, Ecco2k and Thaiboy Digital are the linchpins of Sweden’s Drain Gang collective, a group of prolific artists making music that runs the gamut from spangly hyperpop to disaffected cloud-rap to spritely – as in fantastical, as if made by fairies – pop-rock.
Yung Lean, a musical antecedent of the group who is now a close affiliate, first went viral in the early 2010s with a handful of hypnotic, deadpan cloud-rap singles. Since then he has branched out into post-punk and endearingly mannered singer-songwriter music. Fiercely beloved by a small group, Drain Gang and Yung Lean are internet pop stars – perhaps the 2020s’ biggest genuinely cult stars – who for the past decade have slyly been making some of the most ingenious, ingratiating and genuinely strange music, grafting together underground sensibilities with pop songwriting acumen in pursuit of a sound that’s equal parts alien and familiar.
To my mind, the most distinctive feature of Drain Gang’s music is its breathtaking guilelessness. Despite its relatively cold aesthetic, the collective’s best records are pretty and shimmery, and express a profound fascination with beauty, romance and friendship. One of my favourite Drain Gang releases is Ecco2k’s 2021 PXE EP. Coming in at five songs totalling a hair over 10 minutes long, it’s a disorienting trip through puckish, distorted electronic music, swaggering glam rock and louche pop star bravura. The EP was inspired by the idea of “pixie music” and, fittingly, Ecco2k – real name Zak Arogundade – bounces through the whole thing like a woodland nymph, surrounded by a cloud of video game synths and squealing guitars.
Crest (2022), a collaborative album by Ecco2k and Bladee, the de facto leader of the group, is one of their key releases; at turns brutally concise and unashamedly vast, it captures the collective’s freeform, unlimited mindset, touching on trance, electronica and hyperpop. That album’s centrepiece, “5 Star Crest (4 Vattenrum)”, feels like a mission statement for the group as a whole: unfolding over nearly 10 minutes, it plays like a paean to joy, freedom and adventure. Throughout, Bladee offers what’s ostensibly the group’s modus operandi: “Beauty is my drug / I’m the pusher”. It’s cheesy, earnest, and, filtered through Bladee’s world – all crushed-glass drums and sugar-rush synths – totally intoxicating.
Bladee’s latest record is a collaborative album with Yung Lean titled Psykos, released somewhat unceremoniously – as is tradition for this scene – in the middle of last week. Yung Lean, although better known and, arguably, more successful than any members of Drain Gang, is a close collaborator of the group and is often considered a de facto. His sound, though, is vastly different: it’s marked by a deep woundedness that almost comes across as a form of aggression. “SummerTime Blood” saw Yung Lean successfully place himself in Drain Gang’s dazed, dazzling world, but it’s far from his usual mode, which is bittersweet and anxiety-inducing.
Psykos all but acknowledges this: it feels far more like a Yung Lean record featuring Bladee than a true collaboration. But it does add intriguing wrinkles to Drain Gang’s day-glo affect: pushed into Yung Lean’s world, Bladee’s music takes on a dry, world-weary feeling, almost as if a cartoon character were facing the harsh realities of the world for the first time. The opening track, “Coda”, is a fittingly brutal introduction: over cinematic orchestration, Yung Lean delivers a bitter spoken-word monologue about the trials and tribulations of his life that feels markedly removed from the starry-eyed optimism of Bladee’s music. Instantly, it is a signal that this is not a rap world defined by hard-won happiness and never-ending beauty.
The resulting record is bleak but endlessly fascinating, finding common ground between the two rappers in the world of 2000s post-punk à la Bloc Party – a surprising reference, perhaps, but a deeply trendy one, given recent nods to the group by pop artists such as Paramore and Connie Constance. “Golden God”, a highlight, builds a bridge between this style and the shy bravura the pair display on “SummerTime Blood”, the angular, acidic ring of post-punk guitars creating hard-edged backing for lyrics about underground scene supremacy that draw in familiar rap tropes of wealth and glitzy status symbols.
It’s a sharp contrast with “Ghosts”, a song with a purely spiritual bent, which sees the pair rapping about heartbreak and violent sadness in a way that makes a break-up sound like total sanctification. This track provides the most effective fusion of the pair’s styles: Bladee’s sunnily wounded lyrics (“Only you can glue my blue and broken / shattered, battered porcelain heart”) providing a neat foil to Yung Lean lyrics like “thorns on my crowns / torture and pleasure is the same to me now”. If “Ghosts” feels akin to any Bladee record, it’s The Fool, an aesthetic left turn from a few years back, that changed perceptions of the rapper from an internet-addled electronic rap musician to an artist genuinely interested in screwing with his own identity and reshaping his own codes.
It feels like Psykos will do a similar thing for both Bladee and Yung Lean. It’s a compelling, sometimes genuinely challenging album that plays like totally new territory for the Swedes, asking questions about their emotional modes that they haven’t necessarily had to answer before. I definitely miss the outright euphoria of the best Drain Gang releases, but Psykos seems to suggest, as many Yung Lean records do, that there’s ecstasy to be found in abject sadness.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 23, 2024 as "The agony and the ecstasy".
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