With a diverse career that’s deeply influential to the DIY and SoundCloud rap scenes over the years, Starz feels like the logical next step from Yung Lean’s previous album Stranger. Featuring sparser rapping and a bigger emphasis on ambient pop sounds, Starz lets the Whitearmor production do a lot of the talking. The pads and synths are longer, more vibrant, and start to blend together with Lean’s voice a lot more. Lean starts to distance himself from conventional hip hop verse structures found in his older projects and goes a more experimental route. His voice has a rough, DIY edge to it as he often sounds off-key, balanced precariously between his old Auto-Tuned vocals and his indie rock/jangle pop persona of jonatan leandoer127. Both sides of Yung Lean meld together on Starz, and although there’s still some distinction there, it does feel like the music that Lean has always wanted to make. Where Stranger retained the traditional hook/verse structure of rap songs, Starz often feels devoid of traditional and concrete structures in general. Whispers, muttering, mini hooks, humming, and moaning all sort of collide together on Starz to help set the atmospheric moods. Favoring overly simplistic hooks, Lean seems drawn towards grounding his music with repetitive and catchy choruses.
Unfortunately, the ideas from Starz don’t always translate well. I feel like Yung Lean is playing too hard in both sides of his persona at this point. The rapping sections with Lean’s lyrics about Peruvian cocaine and Goyard are awkwardly contrasted with the mellow tone of his indie-rock sensibilities. It’s not so much the lyrics themselves but Lean’s conscious decision to use them as hooks makes their clash with the experimental sounds unavoidable. The beauty in Starz would’ve been more pronounced if he incorporated some of his singles from this era like “Blue Plastic”. This is exemplified by songs on Starz like “Put Me In A Spell” which sounds like he wanted the further develop the ideas he had presented on songs like “Agony” and “Yellowman” from Stranger. On the other hand, he also tried really hard to retain the familiar Yung Lean sound with songs like “Hellraiser”, “Dogboy”, “Iceheart”, and “My Agenda”. Though none of the songs are bad by themselves, the overall album feels disjointed in how it navigates the two sides of Yung Lean.
Ultimately, Starz represents a kind of crossroad for the Yung Lean moniker. Does he continue to work along the path of his older Yung Lean sounds or does he want to replace them with the experimentation he’s tried with his jonatan leandoer127 side-project? Although he’s tried to get the best of both worlds on Starz, it doesn’t connect as well as it does in theory. Stranger succeeded because while he took elements of gothic literature and aspects of his indie-rock side, it still sat squarely in the familiarity of the Yung Lean side. Starz tries to equalize both sounds far too much and the result is an album that functions well as singular songs but has a disrupted flow when sequenced together. Starz still promises the potential that Yung Lean has consistently achieved throughout his career but as one of the weaker entries in his discography, it places him at a crossroads where he needs to fully commit to the sounds that he wants to develop.
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