Yung Lean

Born Jonatan Håstad in Stockholm in the summer of 1996, Yung Lean is both the perfect representation of hip-hop’s global spread and an artist whose work is deeply specific to his own, singular experience. Raised in his native Sweden as well as in Belarus and Vietnam, he found that the internet made rappers from as far away as Queens instantly accessible: Nas’ Illmatic and 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ reshaped Lean’s brain before he would reshape the rap internet. He accomplished the latter when he was still a teenager, with his hypnotic breakthrough single, “Ginseng Strip 2002”, and Unknown Death 2002 (2013), which ran nostalgia for a bygone era of rap through a clot of binary code and an antidepressant fog. Not content to simply trigger and subvert pangs of nostalgia, Lean has gone on to burrow deeper into his own psyche: it can feel downright voyeuristic to listen to songs like “Yayo”, from 2020’s Starz, which sounds as if it’s the artist muttering to himself on the precipice of sleep—or an even darker expanse.