![]() The songs can be defined broadly: “Drive By” is about recklessness “OMFG” is about depression “The Last Thing I Wanna Do” is about regret and pain. Even a nascent underground sub-genre like emo trap had its forebears: There was the Swedish “Sad Boys” cloud rapper Yung Lean-who, by 2016, had transitioned into the auteur portion of his career-and the mysterious graveyard rapper Bones, who finagled his way onto an A$AP Rocky album before retreating back into the darkness of the web.īut Hellboy stood out because it is extreme and obvious, a record that tells you exactly what it’s about. This is not to say that Lil Peep single-handedly invented a genre or door-busted his way to the top of the industry. The top rap song at the time was DRAM and Lil Yachty’s “ Broccoli,” which sounds ancient now. Hellboy arrived two disproportionately long years ago, before emo trap was marketable and mumble rap was canon. It is an artifact that brings you as close as possible to Lil Peep. It’s callous, brazen, and indulgent, the sound of someone testing out the entire spectrum of feeling for the very first time. Hellboy paints the portrait of a young person who is bursting open with emotion, trying to share his experiences as vividly as he can while covering all the formative scars that still ache. “I ain’t gonna lie, I’ma keep it real/I don’t wanna tell you how I feel,” he sang on “Fucked Up,” at once revealing and concealing the truth. All the while, Peep hid the reasons for his behavior from the listener. The mixtape is filled with suicidal declarations, rampant drug use, and moments of delight and impulse. Uploaded to SoundCloud in September 2016, Hellboy is the masterpiece of Lil Peep’s lifetime. It’s frustrating as someone who remembers a happy brother.” How could the kid who sang, “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself,” be anything but deeply inconsolable? But Oskar also added, “He was not as sad as people think he was. It’s what his image was in a sense.” That image made you think you knew Lil Peep as someone who willingly revealed his pain and struggles in his music. “He gets paid to be sad,” Peep’s older brother Oskar told People on November 17, 2017, hardly more than a day after Peep died. It’s a confession to his fans and himself that, despite his best intentions, he can never truly reveal what goes inside his anguished mind.People knew Gustav Åhr, though. On ‘fucked up’, Åhr sings: “I ain’t gonna lie, I’ma keep it real / I don’t wanna tell you how I feel”. ‘Hellboy’ paints a surreal portrait of an artist – and, more importantly, a young adult – who is struggling. Four years to the day of its release on SoundCloud, and almost three years since the Arizona rapper tragically died from a drug overdose at the age of 21, ‘Hellboy’ was recently re-released on streaming services. ![]() Here was someone willing to think of boundaries as imaginary instead, utilising what sound was necessary to reveal the suffering that lay inside him.Īnd this was never more apparent than on his fifth and final mixtape, ‘Hellboy’. With each release, it became apparent that his ceiling was nowhere in sight. His early records were a little corner of the internet that ensconced fans within warm melodies reminding them that they’re not alone. The late Gustav Åhr, better known as Lil Peep, created music that offer a haven to the disenfranchised.
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