It’s Halloween night, and Blink-182’s “Dammit” blares over the house speakers at Manhattan’s Highline Ballroom. The pop-punk anthem announces the arrival of emo rapper Lil Peep, and the all-ages crowd gathered beneath him treats it like a wrestler’s entrance music. Peep wanders out, dazed, skinny and faded, looking like the kid in the back of Saturday detention. He flashes a bashful little grin as the sold-out, 700-strong audience sings him happy birthday—in about three hours, he will be able to drink legally. When they finish, Peep smiles a little wider and flicks his eyes down: “That’s the most people that ever sang happy birthday to me in my life,” he mumbles. Then his DJ queues up the sub-aquatic glimmer of guitars that introduces “Girls,” one of his biggest internet hits.

Like all of Peep’s music, the song is sticky, with the lint of about nine other tracks rubbed off on it. The loping melody directly recalls Houston screw icon Z-Ro, but Peep’s voice seems to be on loan from Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden. The drowsy trap drums and downtuned guitars all dissolve together like a codeine lozenge in the back of your throat. This is music that fundamentally does not care if it is rap or rock.

The kids in the room who know this song—fervently, avidly—do not care either. They know every song in Peep’s hour-long set, each one rolling out in the same downcast haze. During “Beamer Boy,” which samples lo-fi indie heroes the Microphones, a girl with a backpack and a camouflage bandana over her face leaps up on the bar and body rolls, throwing her hands up and singing along to every word. Next to her, a shaved-head kid in a white tee looks at her, licks his lips nervously, and hops up on the bar too—he stretches out his arms and falls forward on his friends’ upstretched hands.

Peep, wandering around with bug eye glasses, resembles Kurt Cobain rendered as a Bitmoji. The stage is decorated to resemble his childhood bedroom: a twin mattress with rumpled sheets positioned stage left, along with a few anime posters, torn down from his actual bedroom, added for effect. In this quasi-intimate space, familiar yet not, the line markers between punk, emo, grunge, and rap don’t just seem useless—it’s as if they had never been drawn.