Over the first eight tracks of his latest album, Cold Visions, Swedish rapper Bladee teeters on the edge of paranoia, chaos, and his own flow. Teaming up for the first time with producer F1LTHY, who popularised the trap subgenre of rage on Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, Bladee’s sickly sweet cloud rap gets plunged into the underworld and the results are turbulent, even demonic. Neither Bladee nor any other artist in the Drain Gang music collective has sounded this unhinged before. His bars run erroneously over and under the meter, he jarringly ignores rhyme on a whim, he drops some truly weird passages:

You still think that I'm slow but I think I could be slower
In a field that's filled with flowers
And this diesel very sour
You might think that you know
But I'll truly show you power

It feels like it could fail at any moment, as if the beat could fall away and all you would be left with is a Swede rapping atonally in his bedroom, fried out of his mind. But Bladee doesn’t let the momentum drop, and hints of gorgeous melodicism poke through the darkness on tracks like ‘FLATLINE’. It all serves to get you through to ‘DON’T WANNA HANG OUT’, the finale of Cold Visions’ blistering first act, where Bladee delivers a capstone verse for his niche legend.

If Bladee’s musical arc over the past decade has trended away from rawness and towards ethereal bliss, then ‘DONT WANNA HANG OUT’ is resolutely backward-looking. F1LTHY’s beat is blown out and distorted to the point that it almost shimmers, like the waveform is colliding so hard against the compressor that little particles of sound are spraying out of the mix, and Bladee’s demeanour is defiant and resentful. He sounds hardened by the world, disillusioned with cruelty as a response to his past tenderness.

As the hook morphs into the verse, you can hear Bladee’s teeth clench and his lips purse, audibly on the verge of breakdown. His mind is all over the place, but his writing lands with a stoic clarity: “Not crying, I got something in my eye / I got anxiety and I’m high / I’m the type to spiral out of control / I kinda like chaos unfold”. Bladee is unusually sharp here, skewering coked-up LA industry culture and finding solace in Drain Gang’s mission statement of insularity: “I’m not so sure I wanna hang out / blinds down in my house, I don’t wanna hang out / trash bags on the window, don’t wanna hang out / door locked on the safe, I don’t wanna hang out”.

For years now, Bladee’s music has been moving in the direction of beauty and weightlessness. But synths, four-to-the-floor drums and pop melodies can be a mirage, and ‘DONT WANNA HANG OUT’ peers through the fantasy to deliver a more honest, revealing portrait of Bladee. When he sings of “dunya” – the Islamic concept of the present world as a temporary passage to the afterlife – he sounds genuinely resigned to a callous world he cannot escape from, one which promises little respite but for his Drain Gang boys. After a decade of chasing heaven and enlightenment, Bladee arrives at a grim truth that was there all along.

86

Sam Gollings

2 June 2024