Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One)

Emo rap alchemist Lil Peep spends his energy only to kill time. His music mines the contradictions between being young and free and being pessimistic and tortured; how having a future doesn’t make the sheer tedium of existing any easier. It's all fun until he sinks back into dysthymia: “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself/My life is going nowhere/I want everyone to know that I don’t care.” For Peep, depression is a fog that covers the entirety of his lonely and mundane life.

But there’s a certain waggishness to the Lil Peep persona, suggesting he’s at least kind of putting us all on. “It’s like professional wrestling—everyone has to be a character,” he has said. The guy has a huge “daddy” tattoo gothic-scripted on his chest. Peep constantly wants you to wonder what’s going on under that neon mane. His debut album, Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One), is a 24-minute bender informally dedicated to destroying relationships and idling around in what he sees as this vain and absurd existence. Peep’s philosophies are no more profound than a great Instagram caption, and he can come off as a bit of an indignant kid, but it’s easy to see why a new class of spitfires are using him as a talisman for their anxieties.

Born Gustav Åhr, Lil Peep emerged as a suburban degenerate from Long Island recording in his bedroom, high on benzos. He has described his drug-addled pop-punk musings as Makonnen meets Fall Out Boy, originally stylizing his name like RiFF RAFF, whom he called “a role model.” The unique lineage from which Peep descends aligned him with like-minded genre-breakers. In early 2016, he fell in with the Gothboiclique, a collective of melodic trappers straddling the emo and rap worlds—among their members: Lil Tracy, the son of rap innovator Ishmael Butler, and Wicca Phase, former lead singer for the emo band Tigers Jaw.

Peep’s rabid and mostly teenage supporters are enthralled by his juvenile dread and mallcore aesthetic, along with his knack for retrofitting 808 kits onto samples of Underoath, Pierce the Veil, Flyleaf, and The Story So Far. His skeptics argue that he isn’t actually emo, merely a poser trafficking in Warped Tour nostalgia to piss people off; or that he isn’t really a rapper, mostly on the optics of emo whiteness invading hip-hop. But a closer consideration of Peep’s catalog and running mates suggests a genuine marriage of the two sounds, orchestrated by an earnest, budding whiz. Putting songs called “Cobain” and “Gucci Mane” back-to-back on a tape wasn’t so much an act of subversion as an actual sonic template: the tormented punk burying his sorrows in lethargic and absurdist flows. He finds the seams between genres and he mixes signifiers, too. He is the middle distance between Brand New and Future. If one must endure being, Peep suggests, then why not be fucked up?

His writing on Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One) often stars two broken people wounding each other and finding comfort in their failings. “Better Off (Dying)” resigns itself to a romance in decline. On “Awful Things,” Peep treats trivial texts from a lover like a lifeline when separated; “Bother me,” he implores. The discombobulated timeline of “Problems” mimics the dissociation of a blackout, as Peep sighs into each syllable, piecing together memory fragments and weighing their baggage. Even more poignant than his fleeting thoughts on self-harm and self-sabotage are his dazed reflections on intimacy in the age of read receipts and ghosting. He’s as standoffish on “Save That Shit” as he is guilt-ridden on “U Said,” a cycle of alienation that perpetually leaves him alone.

There’s a bit of poetry to these cutting interactions: “‘What have you been through?’ she asked me/Every fucking kind of abuse,” he all but screams on “U Said.” “The Brightside” ups the ante: “Help me find a way to pass the time/Everybody’s telling me life’s short, but I wanna die.” “Burn me down ‘till I’m nothing but memories,” he snaps on “Awful Things.” Each lyric is born with a bawl or a hiss. Sometimes he belts out like he’s trying to purge his body of impurities. Others, he slumps into a dejected whine. The sole exception is “Benz Truck (гелик),” on which he sounds nearly comatose. In any of these states, he’s intriguing, the deliverer of raw grief or rage or joy or shame.

Peep’s overall effect is measured by the degree of skepticism with which you pick up what he’s laying down. His real impact is in his simplicity: He reduces ideas to their root feelings for force, and very little changes once songs are in motion. This can make Peep seem vapid, which he is when his verse becomes too lazy, but he usually connects on utter intensity. Peep isn’t a far cry from Lil Uzi Vert, who channels pop-punk in a shrewder way, but is just as hook-focused and zealous; or Dashboard Confessional, the way nostalgia feels already baked into Peep’s music. They're like singalongs you already know. Some don’t have verses. Most are just the same few repeated phrases. “Save That Shit” waddles through one hook, almost demanding space in the brain, and the repetition, pushed by his dragging phrases, is hypnotizing.

Unlike past Peep projects, Come Over When You’re Sober (Part One) is sample-free, comprised entirely of original arrangements and live guitar. Part of the fun in Peep’s early work was identifying angsty songs of yesteryear, the emo-stained 808s gaining several layers of context. That is missed here, but more crucial are the contrasts still at work, amping emotive riffs with the slap of rap drums. Peep isn’t as expressive as his emo ancestors, and he isn’t as eloquent as his rap idols, but he does effectively bring their stylings together in a provocative new way that riles up the purists in both genres. Turning stray footnotes from modern teenage life into music that claims it’s the most meaningful thing ever is just about the only traditional rock‘n’roll thing about this rapper.