Lil Peep

An icon of the SoundCloud rap era that dominated the mid- to late 2010s, Lil Peep connected with his fans through both his genre-bending style and his lyrics, which vulnerably and transparently addressed issues of depression, addiction, and anxiety. A run of strong mixtapes and guest appearances generated media buzz around the rapper, his approach to life, and his music, which polarized both listeners and the press. Those who championed Lil Peep did so passionately, and his followers quickly grew into the millions. Peep would only live to see the release of one fully realized studio album, his brief 2017 debut Come Over When You're Sober, Pt. 1. The eight-song album was released shortly before the artist’s untimely death just after his 21st birthday. Fans mourned the loss, and Peep’s estate began posthumously releasing music the rapper had finished before his death, beginning with several singles and eventually leading to full-lengths like 2019’s Everybody’s Everything. His early mixtapes were commerically re-released as well, with 2016′s Crybaby still in the charts six years after the rapper’s untimely death. Lil Peep was born Gustav Elijah Åhr in 1996 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and moved to Long Beach, New York with his family when he was four. He began making music as a teenager, eventually adopting the name Lil Peep after a nickname his mother had given him. He began releasing his self-recorded music on SoundCloud in May of 2015, beginning with the Feelz EP and continuing with mixtapes like Lil Peep, Pt. 1 and Live Forever, both released that same year. His sound stood out in part because of his gloomy and expressive lyrics, and also for its inclusion of unlikely samples and other atypical musical elements. His breakthrough mixtapes, Crybaby and Hellboy, were released in 2016, and moved even further into a unique stylistic direction, including punk- and emo-inspired guitar lines and melodies. The following year, he collaborated with Lil Tracy on a pair of Castles EPs. Tracy would return the favor on Peep’s official debut LP, Come Over When You're Sober, Pt. 1, which featured the singles “The Brightside” and “Awful Things.” Months after the album’s release, Peep was discovered dead in his tour bus on November 15, 2017. In the wake of his passing, previously unreleased material began to emerge. Singles like “Spotlight,” the Clams Casino-produced “4 Gold Chains,” and the XXXtentacion collaboration “Falling Down” all materialized before the second Lil Peep album, Come Over When You're Sober, Pt. 2, came out in November of 2018. Various unreleased tracks leaked out over the course of 2019, and a feature-length documentary focused on the life of the departed rapper. Everybody’s Everything was announced for release in November of that year. Preceding the film’s premiere, an unreleased three-song project, GOTH ANGEL SINNER, appeared, and a longer soundtrack was planned for release in conjunction with the film. That album, also titled Everybody's Everything, was the second posthumous collection of Lil Peep’s music and contained all three tracks from GOTH ANGEL SINNER. In addition to previously unreleased material, commercial re-releases of his early mixtapes and extended-plays were included, and eventually accumulated over 15 billion streams across various platforms. Peep’s 2016 mixtape Crybaby was still performing well enough in June of 2023 to enter the Top 100 reaches of the Billboard charts. ~ Neil Z. Yeung & Fred Thomas