As an artist keen on pushing himself creatively with each new release, Yeat is a rarity in contemporary hip-hop. Still, while this year’s 2093 represented an artistic breakthrough for the rapper with its electro-industrial gambit, some fans felt that he was sanding down the more obtuse elements of his offbeat psychedelic sound for mainstream consumption. Lyfestyle, then, is something of a corrective, as the album sees the rapper offering up a spiritual sequel to 2021’s Up 2 Me with yet another zany take on trap and rage music.
Lyfestyle’s cover art, featuring a house engulfed in flames and wild horses galloping around it, embodies the album’s prevailing sense of chaos. In short, it’s a barnburner, with little on its mind outside of conjuring kinetic energy from the most basic of sources: pounding drums, glitched-out arpeggios, soupy basslines, and, of course, Yeat serving as master of ceremonies. Or, more accurately, as drill sergeant: “Sit down, shut the fuck up when you talk, this my lecture,” he barks on “The Costes,” one of many instances where he demands complete silence.
Lyfestyle is Yeat’s giddiest release to date, with each song ably building off the momentum of the one before it, so that the album feels like one constantly mutating track. The songs don’t bleed into a cacophonous mess, but organically contribute to the album’s overarching aesthetic.
If anything, Lyfestyle might be too cohesive, despite periodic genre switch-ups, including EDM (“Gone 4 a Min”) and new wave (“Forever Again,” the only real misstep here). By the time you’ve arrived at the skittingly delirious “Go2Work,” you may not even notice that you’ve raced through eight other scorched-earth bangers, all with deliberately similar tempos and distortion.
Sequencing and gratuitous variants aside—there are five different versions of the tracklist across streaming, digital, and physical formats—the quality and sleekness of Lyfestyle should mark the definitive end of any doubts about Yeat’s musicianship. “Yeah, go ‘head, be a meme, they gon’ forget about you,” he quips midway through the album, making it clear that he’s moved beyond his early TikTok virality and wants to be taken more seriously, while signaling newfound ambitions that surpass those of most of the other artists in his lane.
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