“You don’t even know what I been through,” the tape begins, with Peep rapping flatly over a bass guitar lifted from the Christian metalcore band Underoath, as if to suggest that the full story is not worth the time. The chorus of “Fucked Up,” for example, starts, “I’ve been all the way fucked up/Girl, you got me fucked up/One chance and I fucked it up.” There was no need for excess when he made the consequences of his music so steep.Īmid the clear communication, however, were clues that Peep’s mind was impossible to penetrate. They don’t develop, so much as orbit around a theme. Peep made big songs with a central idea that he could fill with color, in lieu of conjuring moments or people or places. The songs can be defined broadly: “Drive By” is about recklessness “OMFG” is about depression “The Last Thing I Wanna Do” is about regret and pain. Even a nascent underground sub-genre like emo trap had its forebears: There was the Swedish “Sad Boys” cloud rapper Yung Lean-who, by 2016, had transitioned into the auteur portion of his career-and the mysterious graveyard rapper Bones, who finagled his way onto an A$AP Rocky album before retreating back into the darkness of the web.īut Hellboy stood out because it is extreme and obvious, a record that tells you exactly what it’s about. This is not to say that Lil Peep single-handedly invented a genre or door-busted his way to the top of the industry. The top rap song at the time was DRAM and Lil Yachty’s “ Broccoli,” which sounds ancient now. Hellboy arrived two disproportionately long years ago, before emo trap was marketable and mumble rap was canon. It is an artifact that brings you as close as possible to Lil Peep. It’s callous, brazen, and indulgent, the sound of someone testing out the entire spectrum of feeling for the very first time. Hellboy paints the portrait of a young person who is bursting open with emotion, trying to share his experiences as vividly as he can while covering all the formative scars that still ache. “I ain’t gonna lie, I’ma keep it real/I don’t wanna tell you how I feel,” he sang on “Fucked Up,” at once revealing and concealing the truth. All the while, Peep hid the reasons for his behavior from the listener. The mixtape is filled with suicidal declarations, rampant drug use, and moments of delight and impulse. Uploaded to SoundCloud in September 2016, Hellboy is the masterpiece of Lil Peep’s lifetime.
It’s frustrating as someone who remembers a happy brother.” How could the kid who sang, “I used to wanna kill myself/Came up, still wanna kill myself,” be anything but deeply inconsolable? But Oskar also added, “He was not as sad as people think he was. It’s what his image was in a sense.” That image made you think you knew Lil Peep as someone who willingly revealed his pain and struggles in his music. “He gets paid to be sad,” Peep’s older brother Oskar told People on November 17, 2017, hardly more than a day after Peep died.
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