While hip-hop provided us with plenty of colorful characters in 2022, few sounded as truly off-the-wall as the ever-eccentric Yeat on Lyfë, his sixth EP and second major release of the year. Instead of subjecting listeners to another bloated 20-plus track album of barely developed concepts, the rapper gave us what could accurately be defined as all killer and no filler.
Things rarely let up throughout, starting with the incendiary opening of the red-hot “Flawlëss”—where Yeat howls out that “you don’t exist” over a barrage of ear-splitting synths and clamorous drums—all the way to the jerky, arrhythmic “Systëm,” which swiftly strings together a bunch of nonsense phrases like “glock with the switch, with the dick, with the big old clip on the burn’.” Elsewhere, the blunt bassline on the eerie “Got It All” spurs Yeat to deliver one of his more acrobatic vocal performances, muttering, “Bitch, I been working with the dеvil, huh,” before raising his voice to start flexing: “I got a brand new drop, and watch how y’all just flop.”
Yeat does wear his stylistic influences rather transparently, as dashes of Young Thug, Future, and even Playboi Carti can be found in his oddball vocal inflections on tracks like the cartoonish “Out thë Way” and the haunting “Holy 1,” yet his approach isn’t a cheap pastiche of these disparate styles. After all, he speaks his own mutant vernacular—which principally consists of raucous onomatopoeias, Predator-esque high-pitched screeches, umlaut heavy phraseology, and copious mentions of his “twizzys” and “big Tonka trucks”—and in such a militant manner that he could hardly be mistaken for any one of his comparatively comatose contemporaries.
Largely produced by BNYX of Working on Dying, the Philadelphia-based collective that’s helped shape such cult classics as Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red and Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake, Lyfë is an equally dark, strange, and inebriating ride from one of the genre’s most exciting and idiosyncratic new voices. Among other things, it proves that sometimes less really is more.
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