The highlight of my Friday at Palomosa was, without a doubt, Swedish rapper/singer Yung Lean. Yung Lean has come a long way since his earliest cloud-rap releases in 2012 and 2013, delving further into R&B and acoustic ballads rather than the signature, bass-boosted crimewave sounds that defined his early careers.
It was a pleasant surprise, then, that Yung Lean’s set at Palomosa wasn’t restricted to his more recent influences. Instead, we were treated to a captivating journey through the very best of Yung Lean’s entire catalogue. From his opening track (the ethereal “Ginseng Strip 2002”), Yung Lean brought an incredible stage presence despite being a rather reserved performer, urging us to lean in and pay attention, commanding our emotions like the moon commands the tides.
Few artists can so convincingly perform both 808-heavy crime anthems and soft, devastatingly beautiful odes to love and self—Yung Lean refuses to pick a lane, bringing both sides of his energy together into a greatest hits set for the ages. Swaying, raging, collapsing into a weeping heap—all of it is on the table when the criminally unassuming Yung Lean takes the stage.
Despite some of these songs being more than a decade old, he manages to deliver them as something fresh and new, bringing the older, wiser version of himself as he revisits teenage emotional ballads and odes to Afghani kush alike. It never feels inauthentic when Yung Lean dips into his back catalogue, but rather feels like a revisiting of old emotions, reflected through a more adult lens that adds new dimensions to these classic tracks.
Yung Lean got on the mic near the end, right before dipping into the devastatingly beautiful, generation-defining ballad of “Agony”. “I started Yung Lean when I was 16,” he said, thanking us for being there, “And this is just the beginning.” Here’s to another decade of Yung Lean reigning supreme.
