Many wrote about Yung Lean's new album, Jonatanreleased on Friday 2 May for Awal Recordings. Few, however, considered a fundamental detail in the analysis, more or less in -depth: Jonatan Aron Lendoer “Lean” Håstad has been sober for a year.
Indeed, for a year and two months, given that the short but very interesting interview in which he confides not to drink alcohol “366 days” he dates back more or less in early March. The format in question, which, among other things, advice to follow, is called Subway Takes and consists of short interviews in vertical format, therefore perfect for the various Instagram or Tiktok, literally shot in a moving wagon in the New York metro. For reasons of noise, the microphones are kept very close to the mouth, even if they disguise in an original way by the characteristic yellow tiles of the metro.
The fact is that, precisely of the name of the format, the interviewer, Kareem Rahma, always begins with a “What's Your Take?”, That is “What do you think?”, But leaving the interviewed the total freedom to choose the topic. Lean, with extreme surprise of those who have been following him for years, replied “The party is officialy over”. The party is officially over. “I think the mere diddy-ness of everything [sia finita]”The Swedish rapper continued, summarizing in the neologism Diddy-Nest all self-destructive, decadent hedonism and in the case of Diddy also perverse that derives from celebrating to the bitter end, not as an exception but as a rule.” I think we must return to fashion having a girlfriend or boyfriend, settle down, put on a family, do simple things, learn to carve the wood. Only the human race. “
Without restoring in writing all the things that Lean said in that minute and a half (“We have to romantise other things, how to move to the desert or a cave”, Seh Ok Jonatan), it is essential for us to focus on when he admits that “being lying down and throwing up all the time is no more sexy”. And that's what basically pushed him to sobriety.
I am sure that, however happy for our darling, more than one fan has frightened the idea of sudden sobriety. It will be ugly and cynical to say, and I don't want to be misunderstood, but the story is full of cases in which people stop creating relevant things when they are detoxified. Tricky since smoking no longer has no longer chased a decent album. The same applies to Stephen King's novels: all the famous and revered ones are prior to the choice, more or less dating back to the end of the eighties, to stop piping.
Lean though, with Jonatanfound another form of trip in sobriety. In terms of cohesion between the tracks it is an album that does not make sense. But this is precisely the beauty. He begins with an urlo of girl who desperately calls his name, in the first Jonatan Intro, And then, as if it were a prelude, cellos start in detached that they herald a new phase. Not only of his career, but of his life.
Returning sober is equivalent to restoring voice to all sides (as one would say in the branch of psychoanalysis called Gestalt) of one's inner family. Different elements of the ego, which evidently remained too much time, buried under strata and layers of alcohol and substances for years, not solving but procrastinating an ever bigger problem. It is no coincidence that this rebirth album is called by its name. As if the previous ones were his children, but filtered by a substratum of mists and insecurities that he prevented as much to us as to him from seeing himself like it really is. And the truth is that Yung Lean is one of the most creative souls of the new century.
The only way he had not to be swallowed up in the flatness of sobriety was to embark on an adventure that in 2025 makes an alpitour ride seem to seem: to rejuvenate pop, to truly give a handache to the stagnation that capitalist realism imposes giving the future always and only the illusion.
And Sticazzi if the guy has always been out of charge: he wants to sing and in the end it is also good for us. From the grunge/shoegaze of Wild Horses to the industrial and intergalactic blues of Changes (masterpiece and perhaps manifest of the disc), it is precisely this technical imperfection that is the key to not comply with the aseptic pop, perfect, retouched up to the slightest detail so as to be all the same as the end. Jonatan's voice, on the other hand, on this album more than ever, is really his, Dry, with a few effects, as he came out in the recording booth.
Of Yung Lean there is precious that the fact that nothing is never careful of what others think. His first piece “Ginseng strip 2002” had become viral because it was actually the video, shot with a cell phone, of a boy who was not missing in time and also made a little tenderness to be a trapper ghetto in the streets of the center of Stockholm. Yet, the trolls soon became populars and the haters became a fan. There is no way not to love Yung Lean, who with this new album finally presents himself for the first time to everyone as himself, Jonatan. What to respond, if not “very pleasure”.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
