A lengthy treatise from the enigmatic rapper...
"Article published in Clash Magazine. Author: Robin Murray."
Renegade rapper Yeat has built his own empire, on his own terms. The enigmatic artist – forever masked, forever in the shadows – balances mystery with eye-bleeding streaming figures, a profile so huge he’s gained respect from those at the very top of the game. Even Drake was moved to reach out – Yeat appears on ‘For All The Dogs’, and their track together is the highest-streaming moment on the project.
Still remarkably young – a tender 24-year-old – Yeat returns with new album ‘LYFESTYLE’, his fifth. Once more, it’s a blockbuster – a master of the streaming era, he packs a colossal amount of ideas into 22 tracks, and a solid hour of music.
Much of the sonics fit a defined palette. Placing trap aspects against murky electronics and blasting the entire mixture to stratospheric levels, Yeat manages to conjure a form of explicit subtlety. Take opener ‘GEEK TIME’ or early highlight ‘HEARD OF ME’ – the lurid electronics are worthy of Skrillex, but there’s also tonnes of space in his minimalism.
At times, there’s so much to absorb here that ‘LYFESTYLE’ becomes overwhelming. The intensity of ‘ORCHESTRATE’ for example, seems to fill up every space inch in your headphones. Moments of minimalism – the Italo synths on ‘FOREVER AGAIN’ – come as longed for respite amid the noise.
Features, when they arrive, are used sparingly. This is Yeat’s world – only a few may enter. Kodak Black stars on ‘BE QUIET’, Summrs makes a guest appearance on ‘GO2WORK’, and the meteoric Don Toliver appears on ‘NEW HIGH’. It’s the latter who truly impresses – chameleonic, he’s able to twist and turn, blending his style with Yeat’s sound palette.
The balance between a distilled identity and a streaming-era leviathan is difficult to find. ‘LYFESTYLE’ is a huge in scope, but that can mean it becomes repetitive – in particular, the record’s mid-arc falls flat, with songs like ‘ON 1’ feeling as though they’ve been constructed to fulfil aesthetic obligation.
That said, Yeat clearly isn’t making music for critics. ‘LYFESTYLE’ is for the fans, and there’s plenty of them – ‘LYFESTYLE’ is a streaming era construction, with the interchangeable parts able to be spliced separately, thrown into individual playlists. Continuing his game of tension and release, revelation and disguise, ‘LYFESTYLE’ reinforces Yeat’s singular status.
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