I Left Heaven for You and Having Nightmares on the Road Again

Yung Lean's 2d Chance

Yung Lean approached American rap as an outsider, became infamous, and then tragedy struck. A twelvemonth later, he has the chance to practice better.

Yung Lean was in a mental hospital around this time last yr.

It was Mount Sinai in Miami Beach, the city where he'd been recording demos and crude drafts for his third full-length project, Warlord. He was 18, and, though normally based in Stockholm, had spent two months in the city, working for the first fourth dimension in a professional studio. Information technology was chosen the Pink Business firm, and it was in a pink house, down by the ocean with a pool out back.

Lean had ended upwardly in Miami after a stateside tour that his 27-year-old U.S. managing director, Barron Machat, had helped adjust. Barron was a beloved and respected figure in the North American experimental music scene. Known for his belief in the crossover potential of thought-provoking acts, he and his label Hippos in Tanks were said to accept "ushered avant-garde music into the 21st century." Though he didn't release whatsoever of Lean's records, he helped Lean outset a characterization of his own, Sky Team. In Miami, Barron had an apartment where Lean could crash, and connections: his father, Steven Machat, is an entertainment lawyer whose clients accept included Ozzy Osbourne and Bobby Brown. He is currently running for the U.S. Senate.

A number of boyfriend Swedes accompanied Lean on the trip. There was Yung Sherman, then 20, ane of his longtime producers and the sonic architect of Warlord, and Bladee, 21, a frequent collaborator who sings background vocals at Lean'south live shows. And at that place was Emilio Fagone, Lean's 29-year-old primary director, who's been working with him since he was 16.

After the recording sessions wrapped in Miami, Sherman and Emilio flew back to Sweden. But Lean and Bladee stayed backside, with plans to play some shows then head up to New York. "I recall I felt similar, Why is he going to stay?" Sherman says at present. "Why isn't he merely going domicile? Nosotros've been away for and then long, what is he going to do here now? It seems unnecessary for him to stay."

Lean's stage proper name comes from his given proper name, Jonatan Aron Leandoer Håstad, merely likewise from lean — codeine syrup. By his own business relationship, in Miami he was heavily fond, non just to lean, but to Xanax, marijuana, and cocaine, and combining the drugs daily to troubling result. Lean constitute himself slipping into characters that were hard to shake. He started dressing similar a nurse, in infirmary scrubs. He began to carry a pocketknife. Nigh nights the drugs kept him upwardly, then he'd sit out on a balcony, writing a volume in his iPhone chosen Sky that retold babyhood nightmares about people turning into rats — the animal sign of his Chinese Zodiac. Lean showed the book to Barron, and Barron told him it was as well dark, that he shouldn't be writing it.

At some point on April vii, 2015, Barron left Bladee and Lean in the condo. Lean'due south olfactory organ started bleeding, and he checked in on Snapchat; his girlfriend, dorsum home in Sweden, happened to have a nosebleed, too. High and overcome past feelings of connectedness, Lean became detached from reality. He started to destroy the condo, throwing furniture and breaking drinking glass. He was haemorrhage from the droppings when Bladee called 911.

In the hospital, Lean became paranoid that he'd been separated from his hard bulldoze. After midnight, in the early on hours of Apr 8, Lean says he managed to call Barron and beg him to bring him his files.

It was a typically pleasant Miami leap night, with a articulate sky and a comfortable temperature of 75 degrees, when Barron set out, with a 21-twelvemonth-one-time producer from L.A. named Hunter Karman in the passenger seat. According to the police report, he was driving about 60 miles per 60 minutes when he veered out of his lane and ran into a traffic signal post. The car twisted into the intersection, and the engine caught on fire. According to Lean and Steven Machat, Barron had taken Xanax. Strangers rushed in and managed to help Hunter from the flaming wreck, only Barron was stuck. He died in the machine.

Heartfelt tributes posted online remembered his adept gustation and generosity — how he'd proceed places just and then acquaintances could stay in them, and scramble to encourage his artists' well-nigh out-there ideas, like a dubstep magic prove. "He was the most high-minded, cosmic person anyone ever met," said d'Eon, in one case signed to Hippos in Tanks. "He constantly spoke enthusiastically near how civilisation was at a tipping indicate, that we tin do whatever we want musically and in business concern, because we were living in the cultural Wild West."

At the same time, Lean's begetter was flight to visit Lean in the infirmary, where he stayed for four days. Lean says he didn't recognize him at first, only they returned to Sweden together. For about two months, Lean'southward male parent tended to him while he recovered in the countryside, in relative isolation, before moving dorsum into his parents' place in Stockholm. Lean was and so and is now under what he says is "heavy medication."

Back in Sweden, Lean'south other main producer, Yung Gud, set up almost finishing the album. The files that came back from Miami were a total mess, with missing stems and distorted song takes. Working with Sherman, Gud spent months reconstituting incomplete tracks, restructuring unsatisfactory ones, and calling in Lean to re-do vocal parts. In November 2015, the album's start single, "Hoover," debuted with a music video featuring a dirt-wheel rider jumping over a cemetery and a medic shining a calorie-free into Lean's vacant eyes. The unmarried went up for sale on January 20, 2016, and Lean announced that Warlord would be released the post-obit month, to be supported by an international tour that would bring him back to America.

But just five days subsequently the announcement, a different version of Warlord appeared on Spotify, and for preorder on Amazon and iTunes. Its full championship was Warlord (This Record is Dedicated to the Retentivity of Barron Alexander Machat (6/25/1987 - four/8/2015)). Instead of the abstract comprehend art Lean had teased on Instagram, it featured a rough pencil drawing of a Lean-similar character giving the finger. Fans who listened said the songs sounded unfinished, and expressed defoliation over the small-impress copyright, which seemed to aspect the release to the characterization of a man who had passed away: "Hippos in Tanks A division of the Machat Co," it said on Spotify.

The person who uploaded that anthology was Barron's father. Co-ordinate to business documents filed with the country of Florida, only unbeknownst to many, Steven Machat was an equal managing partner in Hippos in Tanks.

Reached by a telephone number listed on his Senate entrada'due south filing papers, Steven says he believed he was inside his rights to release the Warlord demos because he helped fund their creation. "I wanted that anthology out to remember Barron," he explains, expressing frustration that Lean had flown habitation before Barron was buried. Lean'south team was predictably unhappy nigh the release: "They went nuts, 'How can yous put this out?'" Steven says. "And I said, 'Well, fuck you.' Only and so I heard God talk to me: 'Steven, they're evil. If you opposite evil, yous alive.' I analyzed [the music] and realized what they were doing, and I took information technology off."

"There'south nothing good most Lean," he adds. "Yung Lean worshipped the darkness."

When Yung Lean was just viii months erstwhile, he moved with his family from Sweden to Republic of belarus. His dad is a poet, fantasy author, and noted translator of French literature; his mom works in human being rights, supporting LGBTQ communities in Russia, Vietnam, and throughout S America. Russia was where she'd grown upwards, and Lean says the motility to Belarus was partially because she wanted her son to take a childhood similar to her own — though his memories probably aren't equally fond as hers.

"Ane 24-hour interval my dad was gonna pick me upwardly from kindergarten," Lean says. "All the kids were playing, and he's like, 'So where's my son? Where'south Jonatan?' They're similar, 'Jonatan has not been good today,' and he's similar, 'But where is he?' They betoken at the corner, and they'd put me in the corner with, like, a KKK hat. What practice you lot call it? A dunce hat. I'd been standing there like that for perchance five hours."

Fifty-fifty after the family returned to Sweden, when Lean was five, he would never exist swell at school. He and his friends often wound up in petty trouble, getting disrepair for doing graffiti, as happened with his producer Yung Sherman, or smoking weed, as happened with Lean. He got a chore at McDonald'south, simply he did somewhen employ school to his advantage: the academic estimator lab is where he recorded parts of his first mixtape, Unknown Death 2002, before dropping out in 2013, when he was 16.

Released that same yr, his debut was an instant if divisive sensation, especially in the United states of america. Hither was this baby-faced white kid with a foreign accent and a strangely lazy flow, rapping with a simple formula, more than or less: drugs, low, and offhand references to pop culture. Yung Lean incorporated all three, in merely 3 lines, on "Ginseng Strip 2002," an early success with 10 million YouTube plays. Poppin' pills like zits/ While someone vomits on your musquito tits/ Slitting wrists while night evil spirits like Slytherin slither in with tricks. It's piece of cake to see how he could be dismissed as a goof, or fifty-fifty manifestly repelling, but he too attracted existent fans, consistently selling out big clubs in a series of U.S. tours.

Lean emerged at a transitional time in the way music is talked nigh online: sites that in one case trafficked MP3s now produce earnest thinkpieces. And he was a perfect subject. On music blogs and in The New Yorker and The New York Times, he was treated like a puzzle to be solved. What did Yung Lean mean for rap? Was his music tongue-in-cheek, intentionally bad in an endeavour to mock how hollow the genre had get? How did his race play into the attention surrounding him, or how his lyrics were received? How did his nationality? Was he commenting on consumerism, or was he just a wayward teen with a sweet molar for Arizona Iced Tea?

"The concept is definitely not that complicated," Lean says, disavowing any disquisitional underpinnings to his music, equally he ever has. "I just brand videos and stuff, there's not much more to it than that. I'm a musician trying to express myself." He describes his selection of genre equally but one of circumstance. "If it was the '70s, I'd be a punk artist. I was simply born into hip-hop." This is a fairly common argument from white rappers: inexpensive software is the new power chord, and rapping is just what'south relevant now. Simply it's an thought that as well comes from a privileged position, one that sidesteps rap music's origin, so founded on the black, brown, and Latino experience — and the experience in America, at that. Lean may have been built-in into a earth that loved rap, but he can only always approach it as an outsider.

"Y'all could have a lot of reasons to be angry at a white rapper," says his producer Yung Gud. Built-in Carl-Mikael Göran Berlander, he's of mixed race heritage — his grandad was a Nigerian man who met his grandmother, a Swede, in London, and started a family unit that Gud calls "the consequence of racial tourism." When it comes to white rappers, Gud says, "You have people like Slim Jesus and this Stitches dude that just fuck information technology upward. They do weird shit that they shouldn't do considering it's serious." By serious, he means serious: the way "centuries of forced labor and oppression [created the need for] the black hip-hop community to actually have its own arena to do things." Only and then Gud introduces a twist. Coming from Sweden, he says, "I wouldn't say we have the aforementioned acute responsibility every bit a white American to step aside."

For Swedes, American civilisation is simultaneously alluring and oppressive, Gud says. "We look at screens and we're fed with American information, American music on the radio, American games, American everything. It's so vast and immersive, but information technology'southward likewise so infuriating what it does to the earth." Subsequently playing shows in America, he sees the place as "total anarchy, the worst of the worst and the best of the best," especially compared to a small socialist state like Sweden. "As a foreigner, I feel like our approach to grabbing U.South. civilization is simply a part of making yourself heard, getting your presence felt."

But asserting yourself isn't like shooting fish in a barrel, Gud says, when you come from a state where modesty is a deeply ingrained cultural value. "We have this very firm thought of merely keeping quiet, beingness useful, and taking exactly what's yours — preferably a fleck less." That poses a particular challenge for someone interested in life as an international musician, where competitiveness and self-promotion tin can be key. I potential path, Gud suggests, is that of a "technical, educated, calculated producer like Max Martin," a Swede whose work backside the scenes, assisting other artists, has made him i of music'due south most prolific withal least public-facing hitmakers. Some other, it appears, is Lean's style: to infringe from a identify with bigger egos. For a wannabe rapper from Sweden, perhaps, to do something new you have to get-go be a little bit something yous're non.

Yung Sherman, Yung Lean, ECCO2k, and Bladee, in Stockholm.

Gud's fascination with America wasn't enough to make him want to come back there for the early Warlord sessions. "We already did the rockstar thing," he says, "and it's exhausting." With Sherman willing to handle product duties in Miami, Gud decided to stay in Sweden. There, he focused on "Getting up in the morning, having breakfast, and saving my own life."

Lean had visited the city earlier, in 2014, and information technology set the tone for his return. "Nosotros had a rooftop party with Goth Coin, Iceage, and Lust for Youth," he remembers — an American rap group, a Danish punk ring, and a Swedish electronic act. "All of us doing coke and smoking blunts. Very good crew, very good mix. And then some guys from Odd Future came with their, like, skateboards, and they just looked at usa and walked away. They were like, 'This party'south as well much.'"

Being in America, Lean says, always made him desire to seize life to a superhuman degree. Everything was so different, it was similar it didn't count. "We come up from a very non-materialistic lifestyle," he says, "and but, you know, anxiety. At 21, people in Sweden volition be like, 'My life is over, and I'll just work for the rest of my life.' So once y'all practice get to the U.S. and someone meets y'all at the airport and gives you money and gives y'all drugs, nosotros go too crazy."

For Yung Sherman, that fantasy feeling was only more extreme by the beach. "Neon signs and palm copse and guys doing steroids, tight fucking tank tops and fast cars," he says. "That doesn't really experience existent for someone from Stockholm." Built-in Axel Tufvesson, Sherman comes across as the nigh introverted member of Lean'southward crew. He says he had a difficult a time in school, besides, and only fabricated the grades for a job-preparation university, which he dropped out of to focus on music. Recording Warlord was a whole new experience. "It was very weird for me to sit in a studio, and exterior the studio there was a large puddle, and and so there was a large ocean."

Perhaps equally proof of his discomfort, the harsh, typhoon-sized trounce for 1 of Warlord's defining tracks, "Miami Ultras," was equanimous non in the studio but on the pier beyond information technology. Sherman says at that place was a total moon on the night he made it, working on a laptop and headphones while his legs dangled over the water. "During the night, it was very scary," he says. He and Lean, with his shouted delivery on the track, were influenced both by their location and by sounds from home, specifically a creepy track called "The Globe Roughshod" by a Danish synth-punk band named Vår. "Information technology has a really rough, beautiful vibe," Sherman says. "A flake dainty."

Yung Sherman

Bladee

"Miami Ultras" set a new high-point for Lean's audio. Part of that is owing to the fact that, as his producers have grown from teenagers to adults, they've quite simply gotten ameliorate at making beats. Similar Lean's own personal Max Martins, they were always meticulous, first in the more sampled, slacker "cloud rap" style of "Ginseng Strip," and and then in more unique, wholly composed productions like "Yoshi City," from Lean'due south start studio album, 2014's Unknown Retentiveness. The vibe on Unknown Retentiveness was chilly yet oddly pretty, but on Warlord the sounds became even colder. Beautiful synths turned darker, and buildups got more dramatic, for an overall effect that'southward less like stateside rap production and more than similar European difficult trance — mixed with synth-punk and pop. In talking to Gud, practically the only time he mentions American acts is to mutter that people have said he sounds similar them. Like Sherman did with Vår, he prefers to reference more than local sounds: djent, a Swedish way of progressive metal that sometimes features sample-based percussion, or Addis Black Widow, a Swedish R&B group from late-'90s that sounded kind of like Craig David.

Lean's wordplay and delivery has ever been less dynamic than superior American MCs. Just on his nearly successful new cloth, he makes the best of his natural monotone past simply amping up his energy. He doesn't sound like — or audio like he's trying to sound like — Future or Drake or Young Thug; he attempts no vocal feats in his flows. Instead, on "Miami Ultras," Lean comes across more like the punk creative person he says he might've been, outright shouting as he repeatedly hammers the same notes. It's a subtle simply effective shift: the aureola of disengagement that made him seem jokey or sarcastic has been replaced by a feeling that'southward more aggressively jaded. Gone, also, are the gimmicky references to pop cultural trinkets, exchanged for something more haunting: when Lean talks on "Hoover" about waking up covered in liquor, with his coke bag empty, he is speaking near his existent life.

The video for "Miami Ultras" was filmed in the countryside of Sweden after Lean'due south recovery. He appears alone in hospital garb, bloodied, with an I.Five. in his arm, digging a grave. At that place is also a dissever teaser for the track, posted on his Instagram, that incorporates found footage of Miami: rainstorms rocking palm trees, and for a fleeting second, an overturned, burned-out automobile.

"If everything that happened didn't happen, I approximate similar nosotros could look dorsum at Miami every bit a fun time," Sherman says. "But information technology went just shit."

Lean is equally blunt. "I'm blessed to still exist alive. I could accept died, for sure."

A few months afterwards Lean returned to Sweden, he took a job at a factory. While Gud was cleaning upwards Warlord, Lean joined Sherman, Bladee, and whitearmor, another producer who helped out on the album, on an assembly line manufacturing shampoo. "We'd just stand there pressing buttons," Lean says. "We'd put music in the speakers, trip the light fantastic around the factory. Information technology was very prissy. It's similar Lou Reed: after he did some tours, he went home and worked in his dad'southward factory. You tin can't always exist on the summit, you know?"

During the dull return to normal life, he grew closer to his father. "Back in the twenty-four hours nosotros used to fight all the time," Lean says. "I'd throw spaghetti at him, and he'd accept out all the stuff from my studio in the basement. Non a violent relationship, just a very angry relationship. Always since he picked me up in Miami and we spent the summer together, we got really close. We're good friends." Function of their newly shared agreement is the realization that they're both "freelancers," as Lean puts it — his dad with his writing and Lean with his music.

At first, Lean's medication ofttimes made him tired, and his residue was off, only once he got used to it he started to practise, and with an interesting group of people. He got in bear upon with a musician named Avner, who'd defenseless his attending with a Swedish-language cover of Daniel Johnston a few years dorsum. Avner suggested they get running together once a calendar week. Lean started taking boxing lessons, too, coincidentally in a class with Thorbjörn Håkansson from The Embassy, a crucial band in the development of Swedish indie-pop.

Fifteen years ago, The Embassy started a characterization called Service, which released the first album from ane of Lean's favorite bands, The Tough Alliance. There's an old story in The FADER nigh The Tough Alliance, how they were polite and unassuming in person, but when they'd perform they didn't bring microphones; instead, they'd yell and swing baseball game bats at the oversupply. "From the American signal of view, I approximate it'due south aggressive," Lean says, "but I could chronicle to the whole attitude." His favorite Tough Brotherhood vocal was "My Hood," which came out when he was in the 5th grade, a song about loving where y'all're from but besides feeling disgusted with the identify.

When Lean started taking ecstasy a few years afterwards, he got into the group JJ, who incorporated drum samples and quotations of American rap lyrics with ambient music and dream-pop. They were signed aslope Avner to the characterization The Tough Alliance created, Sincerely Yours, and, birthday, helped brand upwardly a formative, bratty scene in Yung Lean's development. Punk in ethos just poppy in sound, with songs full of bright synths that were shadowed past broken-hearted lyrics, these bands took the influence of America and created a uniquely Swedish response.

"You know this type of music only happens once every x years," Lean says The Tough Alliance'southward Eric Berglund told him once. "You guys are united states x years later."

On the February day that Warlord is finally released, in its completed form, I take a railroad train thirty minutes westward of Stockholm's center to the suburb of Sâtra, where Lean at present lives lonely. It's a short, cold walk from the station to his second-floor studio apartment, reached by an outdoor hallway that overlooks a scraggly bit of leafless trees. When Lean opens the door, wearing a soccer jersey, Polo pants, and Gucci slides, he lets loose the sound of reggae music and the smell of incense.

His place is homey, with big plants and brilliant lite streaming through tall windows. A Gustave Doré print of Friction match getting kicked out of heaven is on the wall, and a Renaissance-style tapestry functions like a curtain around a mattress on the floor in a picayune nook. Little Yoshi pillows dot the burrow.

Lean is candid in his responses to my questions, up to a betoken. He walks me through the trip to America, how their crew was "in fancy Miami merely living a dirty lifestyle." He calls Bladee an angel for helping him when he was overdosing. He says he loved Barron, who he calls "i of the most blessed guys I've ever met." But he says there is a limit to his retentiveness about what happened subsequently he blacked out, and I sense there is also a limit to his comfort with talking most it. "I was in a mental infirmary. That'south all I wanna say. I don't wanna say anything more," he says.

He gets up to prepare coffee and switches to a moody, eclectic playlist: The Tough Alliance, Grouper, Lana Del Rey, and iLoveMakonnen's most despondent song, "Down For Then Long." I say that I don't know if Makonnen volition be making anything like that for a while, since he seemed to be getting more into party music, and Lean says, "I don't like party music. I like emotional music."

It's in that spirit that Lean has started work on a new album. Currently in demo stage, with 12 tracks so far, Lean says it will exist produced by Kendal Johansson, who worked with The Tough Brotherhood. Joakim Benon from JJ has agreed to play guitar on it, so Lean wants to ship the tracks to Kanye West's engineer Mike Dean, who helped out on two Warlord tracks that were recorded before Miami, to add more than guitar and smoothen off the product. Lean says it will sound like Daniel Johnston mixed with Lil Wayne. There won't be any rapping.

He plays me a few of the demos. The first is vintage Sincerely Yours, with guitars that are near uncomfortably bright — picture you lot're lying on the beach, which would exist nice, except someone has stolen your sunglasses. Pretty close to his normal vox, Lean sings lines similar I left heaven for y'all, and, Having nightmares on the route again, and a bare chorus: I know what it feels like/ I know what I know at present. Some other track features just him and a pianoforte.

"I'g gonna release it as Yung Lean," he says, fifty-fifty though it doesn't sound very much similar Yung Lean. "Yous put out iii rap albums, then y'all can do any yous like, I call back."

When Lean returned with "Hoover" last twelvemonth, after months out of the public eye, I noticed a few exhausted tweets from non-fans: Why is Yung Lean however a affair? In his flat, I ask how he interprets the criticism. "Everyone says Yung Lean is disposable," he says. "Similar, 'Yeah, finally we can jump on a trend and jump off it adjacent year. Let's wear some Nikes and dance to Yung Lean, and so he'll be gone, the artist will exist expressionless.' I'm not a temporary artist. Nosotros're not like disposable humans that you can throw in the trash."

For outsiders making rap music, success often comes down to how well y'all handle your part. It's an endlessly complicated position, and many fail. "The main hip-hop aqueduct in this country nonetheless sounds like fucking Pete Rock or some Primo Gang Starr shit, and it sucks so bad," his producer Yung Gud told me at i point. "[Most Swedish rappers] never tried to make their own affair. They but took what they liked and they did another re-create of that, they simply made more of it. We don't need more of that anymore. We demand new things."

Lean is at his all-time when he engages America's influence while standing exterior of information technology, and Sweden'south influence while continuing outside of it too. For a teenager from a small country in an ever-globalizing globe, the grass is always greener on both sides, just on songs like "Miami Ultras" and "Hoover," or the ravey "Hocus Pocus" featuring Bladee, Lean has institute his own spot on the argue in betwixt. That's how he achieves the something new that Gud is subsequently, only it tin be unsettling because, fifty-fifty if Lean'southward not trying to, his music involves a lot of unsolved problems — of race and privilege, and of the manner cultural exports impact the earth.

The music Lean is working on now is unique because, more than ever, it offers him the take chances to speak as an insider. He shares existent experiences with Lil Wayne — the author of i of rap's most vivid drug-corruption songs, "I Feel Like Dying" — and also Daniel Johnston, an American songwriter who, like Lean, is known for lyrics that are elementary to the betoken of sounding naïve, and who, more to the point, has been diagnosed with schizophrenia associated with, and some say triggered by, an LSD trip that landed Johnston in a mental establishment in 1986.

Later on the night of my visit, Lean performs at a music festival in Stockholm, his kickoff concert there in over a yr. The venue has a corporate feel, with lots of glass and exposed wood, and the department for winter coat drop-off is enormous. In a well-lit backstage room, Lean sips nonalcoholic beer, plays cards with Yung Sherman and Bladee, and covers himself in imitation claret, in cerise lines up his arm and under his eyes. His manager, Emilio, is there; earlier, he'd helped recover a Gucci bag Lean left in his Uber. Joakim from JJ happens to be downstairs, playing ping-pong.

When it's time to perform, Lean and his crew accept a path outside, into the cold. He's shorter than his friends, puffier. He looks similar the teenager he still is.

Lean comes out to "Hoover" and the crowd knows every word. He bounces on the balls of his feet, and, in the front row, a young adult female with brusk blue hair pulls her turtleneck upwardly over her nose. Bladee, unlike a traditional hype homo, sings over everything, extending Lean's phrases in an otherworldly doubling effect. The sounds menstruation together, from one song to the next, each rails not quite mixed by Sherman but with tendrils of reverb that connect them. A huge screen behind them flashes images of fantasy and horror, dragons and monsters, dragging you into hell. Between songs, I never understand what Lean says because he's speaking in Swedish.

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Source: https://www.thefader.com/2016/06/16/yung-lean-warlord-interview