Yung Lean, real name Jonatan Leandoer Håstad, emerged into our cultural consciousness five years ago when the video for his song “Ginseng Strip 2002” went viral. Springboarding off of the “Cloud Rap” scene, a genre of spacey and atmospheric hip hop being produced by artists such as Clams Casino, Main Attrakionz, Lil B, and A$AP Rocky, Lean polarised music fans and critics who didn’t know what to make of this white Swedish teenage rapper.

Subverting hip hop traditions, expectations and tropes in both style and content, it felt impossible to know how seriously we were supposed to take Yung Lean’s music. But there was something strangely compelling about those deadpan, teenage ennui vocals over beats that were syrupy and hypnotic, and Lean became an internet sensation. His lyrics and visuals, especially in those early Unknown Death 2002 songs, were a chaotic melange of tropes and references. He embraced internet aesthetics, 90s childhood nostalgia (Pokemon, Mario Kart, Nintendo 64), and anime (all seen in the music video for “Hurt”). Hip-hop materialism and drug culture were taken to an extreme and stripped of all context (“Louis duffel bag filled with heroin / Louis Louis Louis duffel bag filled with heroin”).

Elevating it out of a state of complete vacant randomness, however, were moments that suggested a higher level of awareness. In “Hurt” Lean compares himself to Japanese surrealist writer Haruki Murakami (“Bitch I’m Murakami”) whose work often features a sad boy, or sad man-boy, protagonist, a character Lean and his “Sad Boys” collaborators can relate to. Of course this literary reference is then immediately followed by “shawty sucking on my pastrami, get that salami.”