Understanding Lil West’s Post-Everything Rap in 5 Songs

Taking the raw materials and raw emoting of rap and alt-rock as equally sacred gospel, a crop of teenaged—and teenaged at heart—experimenters across the world have gradually been creating a new form over the last few years. Presiding over SoundCloud accounts with followers in the tens of thousands on the low end, singers and rappers with gifts for nasally melodies diminutives affixed to their artist names—Lils Aaron, Zubin, and the late, great Peep are stalwarts of this scene—have forged a scene known to most as emo rap, though obviously even its strictest adherents tend to squirm at that term.

Itchier than most at the application of that label is the Delaware musician Lil West, who in some ways, could be filed in this category. He draws on both booming trap beats and needly guitar lines, and can offer adenoidal whines when the situation calls for it. One of his recent songs involves a reverant interpolation of the song by metalcore lifers Killswitch Engage. But West doesn’t fit in here exactly, not least because genre isn’t really something he’s ever been interested in.

As he told Noisey in interviews over the last couple of months, ever since he was a kid he’s had a more expansive vision of the music world, fueled by his dad’s desire to expose him to all sorts of music. He grew up listening to Gorillaz—themselves genre-contortionists—alongside all forms of rap, as well as metal and emo. It’s not often that Cradle of Filth and Wiz Khalifa come up in the same conversation, but he’s grown up in a world without restrictions. As such, the music that he’s made reflects those unbounded interests, in addition to the stuff that’s more neatly ID’d under the emo rap banner, he’s made ambient ballads, footwork-leaning trap, and industrial-indebted abstractions. He’s more or less said he’s willing to try anything, linking it all with his booming voice, gleeful sense of humor, and knack for choosing chaotic beats that push him to new places.

But artists who don’t fit into neat categories can be a bit tough for untrained ears to crack, so as you read this week’s Noisey Next interview with Lil West, here are a few songs to give you some context and introduce you to his strange array of sounds.

1. “LMK (feat. Lil Aaron)”

Accompanied by a few superstars of his underground scene Lil Aaron—a rapper and studio rat who’s also worked with real deal pop starts like Kim Petras—as well as Judge and Dylan Brady, this track is West as a premiere pop misfit. Over 808 punishment and staticky melodies that sound somewhere between a nu-metal riff and a saw synth, West and Aaron trade these warm, sticky hooks, melting down their bars into an ugly, delicious, and impossibly saccharine soup. You’ll want to go back for seconds.

2. “Marry Me”

In the jittery for this minimalist, Dmac-produced bummer jam, West appears in low light, abraded with bloody wounds that look like the world’s worst rugburn. Incidentally, that’s not a bad metaphor for the emotional state he projects here. At one point he raps “I get flashbacks / Look at all the people I backstabbed,” though it’s unclear intended as a mea culpa or a flex. Bruised, wheezy, and worn out, he crafts a brutal slog for all the quasi-apologetic fuckups out there in the world.

3. “Gum in my hair (feat. Osno1)”

In many ways, this glitch-in-the-Matrix of a pop rap track is both the archetypal Lil West song and an outlier. The producer Osno1 turns in a brittle guitar line and a preening hook befitting of a early 00s pop-punk song, though she slivers and pitch warps it into something more absurd. Even that simple subversion would make the basis for a great West song, but the beauty of “Gum in my hair” is that it pushes so much further, barreling through synthetic nu-metal riffs, fleet-footed kick-drum patterns that owe as much to idm as they do trap production, and ending with a claustrophobic concussion that’s somewhere between black metal and Memphis rap. West weaves through the beat nimbly, proof that he can handle just about any sound, even if it’s all happening at once.

4. “Candy & Cupcakes Without brushing ur teeth”

The first of West and his fellow Delawarean Distance Decay’s beatless collaborations opens with woozy sunrise synth work that sounds like it could have come from one of the ambient world’s many new age revivalists. In some ways, it feels like the natural extension of the floaty genre people were calling cloud rap, but West manages to drift even further out there. This one’s a stratosphere scraper.

5. nothing,nowhere. - “REM (feat. Lil West)”

The other four tracks here demonstrate the many ways West works as an experimentalist, but his guest appearance on the pop-minded Vermont vocalist and multi-instrumentalist nothing,nowhere.’s acclaimed 2017 album Reaper proves he’s adept in hitmaker mode as well. Halfway through the track, West parts the clouds of nothing, nowhere.’s grayscale ambience for a wheezy heartbroken feature that’d feel at home on the radio, on the part of the dial where the alt-rock and rap stations bleed together in one beautiful, emotional mess.