By baptizing his fifth album “Jonatan”, his first name in the civil status, the Swedish prodigy of the Cloud Rap brings together on this fifth album his influences for a result of heartbreaking beauty.
Since the publication of Ginseng Strip 2002 In 2013, a generational hymn for the victims of the last stadiums of late capitalism and the collector of Arizona Iced Tea bottles, Yung Lean experienced and documented a thousand lives in almost as many records.
Involuntary craftsman of a large post-internet schism alongside the Sad Boys, he then published no less than ten albums, four mixtapes and some EPs under multiple alias (Jonatan Leandoer96, the Duos Död Mark or Metal Storm…) in the space of twelve years. To which is added today Jonathan, his first name in the civil status.
A multiplication of collaborations and alias
In addition to a decade, the clan clashes between followers and rap analysts have largely dissipated. The myth brooded by the rapper with the features of eternal baby and the derealizing effect produced by his music in the face of the chaotic march of the world, no.
While we know almost everything about him – his drug problems, his sobriety found, the death of his manager, his childhood, his bipolarity discovered in a psychiatric hospital, his transition to adulthood at the peak of his media exhibition – and that he has been intimate for more than ten years not to overcide his music, Yung Lean always appears to us as an image of our time: both persistent and perpetually.
Taking a malicious pleasure in atomizing the whole of his career – sometimes spectrum haunting the productions of the brilliant Dean Blunt, Crooner Décati or Ersatz of the late Daniel Johnston under the name Jonatan Leandoer96, wannabe Indolent rapper, punk leader at Död Mark, favorite artist of our favorite artists -, he has established himself as one of the most important figures of incarnation (or deincarnation), music of our century. Globalized but autarkic, detached but desperately emo.
As such, this fifth solo album published under the name which made it known appears as a curious musical object which shines by its literality and a summit of SA (fatally unequally) discography. By bringing together Yung Lean with a gesture and Jonatan Leandoer96 under his true identity, Jonatan Aron Leandoer Håstad falls a little more the mask.
A loyalty to his first rap love
If he had started this trend last year with the alternative rock of Psychosis (in collaboration with Bladee), Jonathan Reassemble the fragmentary personae of Yung Lean in one place, only one and the same voice. That it would be a question of counting among the most beautiful and heartbreaking of contemporary music.
Here, the dream of becoming a imitation-guccci mane or a proto-lil B (with all that that had a problem) has stretched, but the first rap loves are still there (Teenage Symphonies 4 God, Terminator Symphony) In the service of a fully Leanian disc. A disc that fixes, perhaps for the first time, a complete and faithful image of Yung Lean as an artist.
On the first single of Jonathan, Forever yung – whose clip depicts his funeral procession at the same time as his rebirth -, role -playing games, assumed names or memes having catapulted his career deserted, Yung Lean has found the balance of his Changing Career. He is free to flourish in Scott Walker or Leonard Cohen of his time on productions sublimated by the arrangements of Rami Dawod.
Of his time, since, by finding an inflection point between his neurasthenic rap, folk culture (Swan Song), Hantological music on guitars (Dean Blunt, Icement, Bar Italia…) and its disenchanted poetry carried by a timbre of an overwhelming falsehood, Yung Lean records something of his time.
In a way, that’s what he has always done. But listening to the superb Horses, Swan Song, Babyface Maniacs, I’m Ur Dirt, I’m Ur Love or Changes, Yung Lean may have found a way to ward it off rather than undergo it. The existential emptiness is still there, in hollow, in this fractured voice, in these haunted productions sometimes reminiscent of OneOhtrix Point, within these walls of saturated guitars, but, by giving up the pieces of his identity with drawers, Jonathan learns to fill it.
Jonathan (World Affairs/Awal/Sony Music). Released on May 2. In concert at Zenith Paris – La Villette on November 24.
