Young Eman – ‘BINE’ review: a wild ride with a dark side

Young Eman has become the talk of the UK underground with his warped, genre-blurring take on rap. The 20-year-old delivers sonic whiplash, hurtling between electronica, trance, trap and more at skin-melting speed before your brain has had a chance to categorise what it’s hearing. Since his explosive 2025 breakthrough EP ‘Steeze Kills’, the Sheffielder has stretched his music far beyond the conventions of rage rap. And on his debut mixtape ‘BINE (Born In New England)’, he pushes that restless experimentation to the max, finding beauty in the chaos – even when something bleaker lurks beneath it.

From the start, you’re dragged into a technicoloured sonic universe, where apocalyptic basslines, clanking cymbals and abrasive synths come crashing down around you. He creates rowdy, soul-thumping anthems like ‘Mazda’, a rage rap masterclass with TeeboFG, and cuts like ‘Work On Me’ and ‘Turmoil’, where high-pitched piano keys skitter above clattering 808 rolls for an irresistibly propulsive rush. Eman’s production whips between electronica’s meditative pull and the chest-rattling force of rage, with the odd delicate glockenspiel chime flickering through the wreckage for a toyetic sweetness.

His voice is just as elastic as the production, shifting character with such ease that his lyrics become a theatrical experience. On ‘Money & Violence’, he sicks up the mantra “Seize the moment!” from the back of his throat, delivering it as a guttural chant; on ‘The End’, he muses, “Fast car and the nightlife tellin’ me / Maybe I should slow my life down?” with a wide-eyed innocence that makes the prospect of Eman actually behaving himself feel deliciously tongue-in-cheek. Then there’s ‘Popstar In The Bits’, where he pitches his voice up on the chorus to become Eline De Sainté Vherodia, his own gobby, ride-or-die chick.

But an uneasy tension emerges between the delirious fun of his music and the nihilism lurking beneath it. Tracks like ‘The End’ and ‘Ldncity’ hint at the limits of his breakneck lifestyle and the emotional shutdown that comes with it, but the mixtape’s opener ‘How To Fake Your Death’ brings that bleakness into particularly strange focus. Swooning saxophone and scattering piano keys soundtrack a cowboy noir fantasy, Eman plotting his own disappearance, ducking the cops and watching the world unfold without him. The production’s almost cartoonish exuberance contrasts with the bleak, lived-in sadness of his lyrics, which ground his fantastical escapism in a world shaped by excess, heartache and nihilism.

For all its clattering excess, ‘BINE’ reveals an artist whose world is stranger and more expansive than his breakthrough hits initially suggest. The longer you spend in Eman’s world, the harder it becomes to ignore the ugly truths hidden beneath his riotous antics and sonic rough-housing. As the fantasy gives way to something bleaker, Eman keeps stretching his sound into increasingly unexpected shapes – and the fun is in watching just how strange it can get.