Is There Life on Planet Yeat?

Yeat is from the future. Yeat is not from this planet. According to the Yeat mythology, this is all the biographical detail you need to know about the 23-year-old Portland rapper who currently has a stranglehold over children and young men aged 12-30, and whose new album 2093 does little to expand upon those already sparse details. Yeat’s fans will tell you this is part of the point. One does not listen to Yeat expecting lyrical brilliance or even coherence. Like Playboi Carti before him, he traffics almost exclusively in vibes, creating a lush universe that listeners are expected to simply let wash over them. This works in small doses, as there’s a certain kind of magnetism to Yeat’s submerged delivery and his unique vocal trills that land somewhere between Southern rap ad-libs and the millennial and Gen Z soundtrack of “rage” rap. But over 2093’s 22 tracks, Yeat struggles to make much of a case for sticking around on his planet for very long. 

Even when other artists appear in Yeat’s universe, they feel suspended in space, with no real sense of place to inhabit. Consider Lil Wayne’s noteworthy appearance on “Lyfestylë,” where he sounds like he’s been beamed in for a feature to justify the song’s existence. Both “Stand On It,” with Future, and “As We Speak,” with Drake, feature half-hearted guest verses that still manage to feel jarring in contrast with the general emptiness of Yeat’s content. Still, Yeat’s guttural half-drawled delivery has its appeal, especially coupled with the sonic landscape he’s so deftly constructed since his 2021 breakout mixtape Alive. But here he struggles to hold his own as the main character. There are enough interesting sounds to sustain the record, but just barely.  While the album’s theme is well-established in the text (Yeat describes himself as an alien what feels like 100 times), there’s little to chew on as a listener, and halfway through, most of the songs start to sound the same. 

There are moments of brilliance, of course. On “Nothing Change,” Yeat rides a buoyant, dystopian-sounding beat while infusing his voice with a palpable sense of feeling. “I don’t wanna hear lies, I wanna hear how you feelin’,” he raps with a delivery that evokes the vast loneliness that must exist for a marooned space traveler. On “Shade” we hear clashing synths reminiscent of Yeezus and the song eventually blooms into an intergalactic mesh of sounds fit for a sci-fi movie. “Riot & Set it off” rides a frenetic drum pattern, interjected by protracted synth jabs that take the “rage” rap sound into almost EDM terrain, before a slowed drum pattern cuts into the chaos and Yeat’s vocal gymnastics manage to wrangle a breezy, melodic current.

On “Bought The Earth,” Yeat hovers around an emotional resonance that could use some color. He’s rapping about riches “he never asked for,” and seems to genuinely lament some of the trappings of fame. There are glimmers of unrequited love, of a dark interiority driving the music’s brooding, sci-fi aesthetic. Here, the excuse that listeners don’t come to Yeat for lyrical depth can only take you so far. The album is awash in these intricate, deliberate textures, but Yeat’s own satisfaction with his imagination belies any actual creativity. “Tell Me” sort of sounds like OK Computer-era Radiohead which would be more compelling if Yeat had a better grasp on storytelling. He’s ostensibly communicating with a lover or ex-lover, clinging to King Krule-esque obliqueness except with none of the passion, instead landing flat. “More” offers an example of Yeat’s lackluster songwriting detracting from an otherwise compelling beat. Lines like “I could lose control, uh, I’m a CEO, uh/You can’t lose control, shit, ’cause you don’t have self-control” are so confounding that the track will likely be over by the time you give up on making any sense of it. 

It is true that Yeat’s music is better suited for album format than the loosie-driven output of his peers, and for this alone he deserves credit. 2093 takes enough daring leaps out of typical Yeat territory to warrant repeat listens, but Yeat’s ambition ends up being the album’s undoing. At 78 minutes, 2093 ends up feeling monotonous, even as Yeat’s exploration into new sounds and cadences yields occasionally interesting results. Why take on the challenge of picking out dynamic new styles if you’re just going to rap the same verse on every one of them? This is a quality he frustratingly shares with his most common point of reference: Travis Scott. Both artists command a brand of hypnotic control over legions of young listeners all while saying absolutely nothing. If this is what the future indeed sounds like, it’s sort of depressing.