Rage rap can be rote and exhausting, but in small doses—like on the Portland rapper’s new pared-down and hypnotic album—the style can be ridiculous fun, electrifying, and hyperreal.
Every pop decade has its cult crazes—Beatlemania in the 1960s, Durannies in the ’80s, Bieber Fever, Barbz, Swifties, and more in the late 2000s and 2010s. Strange as it may seem, Yeat is the newest inheritor of that type of fan delirium. Listeners write comments on videos for Yeat’s new project Lyfë saying his music revived their dying grandmothers and that he’s the best thing the human race has produced since the invention of the wheel. When given a chance to FaceTime the rapper, one fan howled Yeat’s lyrics at his face like a worshiper stunned by God’s light. It’s often difficult to tell whether these typically young fans really think he’s the suprëme being or they’re just shitposting. Either way, it’s the perfect half-meme reaction to a man who rose to fame off TikTok hits, a Minions collab, and a slew of mutant vocal methods.
Detractors often say Yeat’s music style—rage—is too uninspired and repetitive: bashing beats and super-shiny melodies engineered to turn concert halls into mosh pits. They’re not completely wrong. Stretches of his last four projects were fatiguing, and the busyness and intensity dull its impact on repeated listens. But in small doses—like on Yeat’s new Lyfë, which has a pared-down tracklist and hypnotic sound—the style can be ridiculous fun, electrifying, and hyperreal, like giant chainsaws ripping through rubber.
Take “Talk,” Lyfë’s only single. Police sirens set a frantic scene, and then a shrieking synth catapults Yeat’s flexes into the sky: “Head #1 up on these charts, we stuck or what?” Mangled background vocals creep like demonic backup singers shadowing Yeat’s steady voice. Barely any other major label rap production in 2022 sounds as unhinged and off-kilter as this. Even some of Yeat’s most popular rage rivals, especially Ken Carson, are like cardboard Flat Stanleys compared to Lyfë’s explosive charisma. “Talk” was produced by BYNX, a member of the Working on Dying collective who cooked up many of the EP’s best beats, including the blisteringly bright “Flawless.” Then there’s “Out the way,” where Yeat wrenches out dino burps and evil Peppa Pig honks over a beat so squiggly it’s like he’s in front of you doing a goofy little dance. The synergy between Yeat and BNYX is what makes Lyfë more than just a scattered vibe-mash. Equally, without BNYX, the production sometimes drops into rage by rote mega-synths, as on “Up off X” and “Come on.”
Behind the hyperkinetic facade of the sound, though, lurk stream-of-consciousness lyrics that often describe a fucked up life that’s more wretched than rageful. “This could be my last song, hoe, it feel like I’m dyin’ on that X,” Yeat cried on the unnerving 2021 track “Let ya know,” one of many allusions to his addictions to Percocet and ecstasy. “Bag after bag after bag I can’t stop, yert after perc after yert I can’t stop,” he groans over the churning guitar and robotic banshee wail synths of “Can’t stop it.” Extreme drug use comes up so often in Yeat’s music it gets to be surreal, like percs and X are recurring characters in a cinematic universe that also includes his cars, his racks, his twizzies.
The best of Lyfë is pure hallucination music, with layers and sublayers of sound drowned in effects. On the Luca Malaspina-produced “Holy 1,” Yeat grumbles and shrieks about killing people, being a star, and trusting no one all in the same choked breath. Vaporous ad-libs and deformed growls careen over the bassline and dissolve into sacred-sounding hums. Descending deeper into the dissonance on “Killin em,” Yeat twists his low-syllable raps into an anthem for those who “come from that dirty… drinking that dirty.” Yet even on the record’s closest thing to a soul-baring song, it’s still the neon murk of the sound that compels your attention the most. Yeat hasn’t yet reached Future’s tortured tension, Young Thug’s artful eccentricity, or Playboi Carti’s squeak-scream wonder—the three vocal acrobats to whom he’s typically compared and accused of ripping off. But there’s also a sense that he’s not really trying to write heart-seizing narratives or leap much farther than his predecessors.
Yeat fans dig his music’s insularity and world-building, made from the many umlauts, alien voices, and Yeat-lish slang he’s popularized. It’s like the rage equivalent of Drain Gang lore, a similarly dense web of meme mythology. For ultra-fans, everything Yeat makes is a “vibe,” a “feeling,” and if you don’t get it then you’re an oldhead. For haters, and there are many, the 22-year-old is a copycat, a Zack Bia-boosted industry tool, and a man who raps like Yoda with a tummy ache. Lyfë doesn’t prove or shred those allegations, but if anything it sounds like Yeat has no concern for the backlash. He’s off on his own lonely planet, gurgling and spewing ad-libs into the cosmic void.
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