Yung Lean/Jonatan Leandoer127
When Yung Lean makes lo-fi art rock, he goes by the name Jonatan Leandoer127. Jonatan Leandoer127 dropped the album Nectar on Jan. 25, 2019 — but name Yung Lean wasn’t even mentioned once in the album’s press releases. Yung Lean, the Swedish musician and totemic sad boy, who became famous at 16 for his depressive cloud rap, is now 22 and is trying to reinvent himself.
Yung Lean started on SoundCloud and rose to fame in 2013 when his music video for Ginseng Strip 2002 went viral. He went on to release the EP Lavender and his first mixtape Unknown Death 2002, and then the single “Kyoto,” his most popular track to date. “Kyoto” dropped right as I was learning to drive, and I spent hours driving my friends around with the bass turned all the way up, the car vibrating to the track’s heavy reverb and lush synthesizers. Even then, I knew Yung Lean himself not a talent. Instead, Yung Gud, Yung Lean’s friend and producer, uses echo and autotune to envelop Yung Lean’s despondent, hollow voice. This lavish production allows Yung Lean to posture as the leader of the sad boys. Literally, because Yung Lean co-opted the term to name his crew Sad Boys Collective.
“I got an empire of emotion / … / Coke filled nose, too weird for them other fuckboys / Catch Lean and Sad Boys,” Yung Lean mumbles to the camera in the “Kyoto” music video, standing in front of a row of Arizona teas in an Asian convenience store. His lyrics are filled with references to luxury brands, drugs, Arizona tea, and Japanese culture. Like many SoundCloud rappers, he’s an outsider. He’s a mix of internet meme and rapper, using imagery of early 2000s internet nostalgia: vaporwave, flip phones, Microsoft Paint, and anime. Primarily, Yung Lean has cultivated a devoted fan base of boys between the ages of 13 and 18 through pure sadness.
His lyrics capitalize on the aesthetic of performative melancholy. His earliest tracks in 2013 and 2014 built a cult fan base on insincere emotional anguish. In “Yoshi City,” on Unknown Memory, Yung Lean raps, “I’m a lonely cloud.” In “Die With Me,” Yung Lean says, “I’m worthless, I’m nothing.” On “Gatorade,” Yung Lean covers all his usual bases: self-harm, luxury, and apathy. His fans speak his language, express his lifestyle, and manifest his sadness as a foil for self-absorbed masculine wallowing. They are immersed in the image of his movement: Hawaiian print, bucket hats, red-tinted sunglasses, Xanax, lean. Lean’s lyrics are filled with women-caused pain, drugs, violence, and aesthetics. This, in association with depression, has the ability to create a dangerous cult of young sad boys who conflate mental health with a contemporary culture and aesthetic.
After his initial success in 2014, Yung Lean went on to release two albums of the same ilk, suffer from addiction to the substances he rapped about, get hospitalized, and move back to Sweden to live with his parents. When he dropped Stranger in 2017, he finally managed to reach genuine emotional depth, drawing on his own personal experience as well as his nightmares. But while he was encountering real hardship and exhibiting sincere growth, the landscape of rap has come to adopt his hazy, melancholy, insincere cloud rap style. His artificial sadness became mainstream, but somehow Yung Lean doesn’t seem able to participate in his genre’s success. His most recent album as Yung Lean, Poison Ivy, was an unimaginative regression.
Only months after Poison Ivy, Yung Lean might have a new audience in mind with Jonatan Leandoer127’s new rock album. Nectar casts the old Yung Lean’s lyrics in a new compelling light, applying his disaffected sensibilities to a new genre. Without the clichés of his cloud rap, he’s able to transform the sad boy into something more profound. “I wonder why / You treat me so good / When I’ve been so sad / I put a curse on myself,” Leandoer127 sings at the beginning of Nectar’s “Razor Love.” As Leandoer127 reflects in what feels like a truthful way, he takes responsibility for his past, accepting his role as a player in an actual music scene instead of just an internet meme phenomenon, and moves past the sad boy.
