The 21-year-old Portland rapper isn’t doing anything all that new, but he has a refreshing album-focused approach, best listened to as one continuous stream, getting lost in the noisy madness.
Yeat is a white rapper in his early 20s from Portland who questionably wears turbans, uses umlauts in his song titles for no reason, and is trying super hard to make lingo like “luh” and “twizzy” happen. He hit the TikTok lottery last summer with one line on “Gët Busy”: “This song already was turnt, but here’s a bell,” followed by what sounds like a gong being hit with a sledgehammer. It was the catalyst in skyrocketing Yeat from toiling away in the underground to being signed by Zack Bia, a so-called “cool” influencer.
I know this all sounds incredibly corny but hear me out. Unlike the usual white rapper advertised as the next big thing, Yeat doesn’t feel like he was handpicked and molded by some deep-pocketed record label (see: The Kid Laroi). For a while, he experimented with his blurry AutoTuned-soaked delivery full of screwball melodic touches built off Young Thug and the YSL camp as a minor member of the now-disbanded SoundCloud collective Slayworld. Yes, his music often leaves me with the feeling of something I’ve heard done better before, but he has a refreshing album-focused approach, best listened to as one continuous stream, getting lost in the noisy madness.
2 Alivë, the polished sequel to the first of three full-length projects he released last year, has that quality. It’s hard to highlight standout tracks, instead, it’s the moments that cut through the vibescape, like his Travis-like AutoTuned hoots on “Poppin.” Or when he whistles, burbles his lips, and pitches up his vocals like a digicore artist in the background of “On tha linë.” Or how he snarls on “Jump” over a beat where the drop hits like the finale of a firework show. Or the nearly two-minute blustering flow smack in the middle of “Rollin,” interrupted by a line that would make early 2000s Juelz Santana proud: “Osama Bin Laden my bro.”
I do wish the lyrics mattered more. It’s not to say that he needs to rap about something other than being zooted out of his mind, but the only lines that really stick are because I’m thinking why the hell did he just say that. (For example the absurdly dark: “Off the perc I can’t walk at all, paraplegic,” on “Doublë.”) Like during Future’s Monster to DS2 run, it wasn’t just that he was numbing himself with Percocets and molly, it was the way that the numbness fucked everything up in different ways. Or even Playboi Carti on “Teen X,” a song about being extremely faded, is set off by the exasperatedly delivered line, “I just broke up with my bitch.” Even in contrast to “I just broke up with my bitch,” Yeat’s lyrics are too vague.
But to harp on lyrics isn’t exactly the point of Yeat. Not everything needs to be spelled out anyway, sometimes words don’t do a feeling justice. 2 Alivë is about how big and loud it is, a production style that has been labeled “rage.” Though this production trend is retooled from 2010s Atlanta, whether that be the more eccentric instrumentals in the catalog of Mike WiLL Made-It, or the business-under-the-percussion you can find on some of Dun Deal or C4’s beats on 1017 Thug, or 2015 Metro Boomin and Southside, who were basically soundtracking a futuristic doomsday. Those beats are more exciting, but it’s interesting that Yeat’s idea of expanding is to work his way deeper into that sound instead of searching for influences outside of the genre. Yet it leads me to my feelings about 2 Alivë in general: It’s pretty good fun but the small details prevent it from being that time-stopping moment it wants to be.
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