lil yachty new album review

With ‘Let’s Start Here,’ Lil Yachty Emerges as Music’s Boldest Creative Director

By Jeff Ihaza

Lil Yachty is rich. The 25-year-old musician posts TikToks featuring exotic Italian furniture, and goes vintage shopping with Drake. By the time he graduated high school, he’d already bought his mom a house. He caused a mild international incident with his viral hit “Poland,” a loosie released late last year in which he croons, with impossible sincerity, about bringing illegal pharmaceuticals into Poland. One couldn’t imagine a more charmed Gen Z existence. And yet, on “:(failure(:,” an early interlude from his left-turn of a new album, Let’s Start Here, he says that he’s “seen failure a few times/More recently than before, actually.”

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Maturation is a central theme of the album. You can hear the inspiration of Tame Impala ’s anxious midlife musing on “the ride-,” featuring rap experimentalist Teezo Touchdown. The song’s lush, psych-rock production makes for a fitting landscape. We’re bearing witness to a childhood’s end, as both howl into the void. There is, indeed, a lot of howling on the album. 

Oohs and ahhs stretch to the heavens with intention — like on standout “pRETTY,” which is already proving to be a hit on TikTok, and sounds like a slowed bedroom cut from the cult label Naked Music. Percussion rumbles gently over the staggering two-step, while a sensual, otherworldly warble breaks through the clouds like a ray of sunshine in spring. 

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You could call Let’s Start Here a rebuke of the notion that listeners have abandoned the full-length album. The record’s tight 57 minutes feel as cohesive a project as any artist has released in the streaming era. Yachty’s genuine adoration of his musical inspirations is like the Gen Z alchemy of Pinkpantheress, able to turn familiar source material into something entirely new. 

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Let’s Start Here.

Quality Control / Motown

February 1, 2023

At a surprise listening event last Thursday,  Lil Yachty   introduced his new album  Let’s Start Here. , an unexpected pivot, with a few words every rap fan will find familiar: “I really wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, not just some SoundCloud rapper or some mumble rapper.” This is the speech rappers are obligated to give when it comes time for the drum loop to take a backseat to guitars, for the rapping to be muted in favor of singing, for the ad-libs to give it up to the background singers, and for a brigade of white producers with plaque-lined walls to be invited into the fold. 

Rap fans, including myself, don’t want to hear it, but the reality is that in large slices of music and pop culture, “rapper” is thrown around with salt on the tongue. Pop culture is powerfully influenced by hip-hop, that is until the rappers get too close and the hands reach for the pearls. If anything, the 25-year-old Yachty—as one of the few rappers of his generation able to walk through the front door anyway because of his typically Gushers-sweet sound and innocently youthful beaded braid look—might be the wrong messenger. 

What’s sour about Yachty’s statement isn’t the idea that he wants to be taken seriously as an artist, but the question of  who  he wants to be taken seriously by. When Yachty first got on, a certain corner of rap fandom saw his marble-mouthed enunciation and unwillingness to drool over hip-hop history as symbols of what was ruining the genre they claimed to love. A few artists more beholden to tradition did some finger-wagging— Pete Rock and  Joe Budden ,  Vic Mensa and  Anderson .Paak , subliminals from  Kendrick and  Cole —but that was years ago, and by now they’ve found new targets. These days, Yachty is respected just fine within rap. If he weren’t, his year-long rebirth in the Michigan rap scene, which resulted in the good-not-great  Michigan Boy Boat , would have been viewed solely as a cynical attempt to boost his rap bona fides. His immersion there felt earnest, though, like he was proving to himself that he could hang. 

The respect Yachty is chasing on  Let’s Start Here. feels institutional. It’s for the voting committees, for the suits; for  Questlove to shout him out as  the future , for Ebro to invite him  back on his radio show and say  My bad, you’re dope.  Never mind if you thought Lil Yachty was dope to start with: The goal of this album is to go beyond all expectations and rules for rappers.

And the big pivot is… a highly manicured and expensive blend of  Tame Impala -style psych-rock, A24 synth-pop, loungey R&B, and  Silk Sonic -esque funk, a sound so immediately appealing that it doesn’t feel experimental at all. In 2020, Yachty’s generational peers,  Lil Uzi Vert and  Playboi Carti , released  Eternal Atake and  Whole Lotta Red : albums that pushed forward pre-existing sounds to the point of inimitability, showcases not only for the artists’ raps but their conceptual visions. Yachty, meanwhile, is working within a template that is already well-defined and commercially successful. This is what the monologue was for? 

To Yachty’s credit, he gives the standout performance on a crowded project. It’s the same gift for versatility that’s made him a singular rapper: He bounces from style to style without losing his individuality. A less interesting artist would have been made anonymous by the polished sounds of producers like  Chairlift ’s Patrick Wimberly,  Unknown Mortal Orchestra ’s Jacob Portrait, and pop songwriters Justin and Jeremiah Raisen, or had their voice warped by writing credits that bring together  Mac DeMarco ,  Alex G , and, uh,  Tory Lanez . The production always leans more indulgent than thrilling, more scattershot than conceptual. But Yachty himself hangs onto the ideas he’s been struggling to articulate since 2017’s  Teenage Emotions : loneliness, heartbreak, overcoming failure. He’s still not a strong enough writer to nail them, and none of the professionals collecting checks in the credits seem to have been much help, but his immensely expressive vocals make up for it. 

Actually, for all the commotion about the genre jump on this project, the real draw is the ways in which Yachty uses Auto-Tune and other vocal effects as tools to unlock not just sounds but emotion. Building off the vocal wrinkle introduced on last year’s viral moment “ Poland ,” where he sounds like he’s cooing through a ceiling fan, the highlights on  Let’s Start Here. stretch his voice in unusual directions. The vocals in the background of his wistful hook on “pRETTy” sound like he’s trying to harmonize while getting a deep-tissue massage. His shrill melodies on “paint THE sky” could have grooved with  the Weeknd on  Dawn FM . The opening warble of “running out of time” is like Yachty’s imitation of  Bruno Mars imitating  James Brown , and the way he can’t quite restrain his screechiness enough to flawlessly copy it is what makes it original.

Too bad everything surrounding his unpredictable and adventurous vocal detours is so conventional. Instrumental moments that feel like they’re supposed to be weird and psychedelic—the hard rock guitar riff that coasts to a blissful finale in “the BLACK seminole.” or the slow build of “REACH THE SUNSHINE.”—come off like half-measures.  Diana Gordon ’s falsetto-led funk on “drive ME crazy!” reaches for a superhuman register, but other guest appearances, like  Fousheé ’s clipped lilts on “pRETTy” and  Daniel Caesar ’s faded howls on the outro, are forgettable. None of it is ever  bad : The synths on “sAy sOMETHINg” shimmer; the drawn-out intro and outro of “WE SAW THE SUN!” set the lost, trippy mood they’re supposed to; “THE zone~” blooms over and over again, underlined by  Justine Skye ’s sweet and unhurried melodies. It’s all so easy to digest, so pitch-perfect, so safe.  Let’s Start Here. clearly and badly wants to be hanging up on those dorm room walls with  Currents and  Blonde and  IGOR . It might just work, too. 

Instead, consider this album a reminder of how limitless rap can be. We’re so eager for the future of the genre to arrive that current sounds are viewed as restricting and lesser. But rap is everything you can imagine. I’m thinking about “Poland,” a song stranger than anything here: straight-up 1:23 of chaos, as inventive as it is fun. I took that track as seriously as anything I heard last year because it latches onto a simple rap melody and pushes it to the brink. Soon enough, another rapper will hear that and take it in another direction, then another will do the same. That’s how you really get to the future. 

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Lil Yachty’s Great Gig in the Sky

Since the release of his Lil Boat mixtape in 2016, Lil Yachty has cultivated a peculiar rap career that has benefited from versatile musical interests. The Atlanta rapper, singer, and producer’s early work juggled booming southern trap drums, gauzy synths, unclearable samples , and melodic sensibilities on loan from children’s television. Shifting listlessly between disaffected snark and sweet repose, the best songs answered the question of what Brian Wilson’s teenage symphonies might’ve sounded like if he’d grown up hanging around the Migos. On future projects, Yachty leaned into the gruff anthems of his labelmates on Atlanta’s Quality Control Music, toughening up on 2018’s Lil Boat 2 in some of the ways Drake did on Scorpion the same year, this after dividing critics and listeners with the synthpop and reggae excursions on Yachty’s 2017 debut studio album Teenage Emotions .

Restlessness saves his catalog from the pedestrian work of peers chasing the sound of a beloved early mixtape. Lil Yachty is always up to something , quietly penning an undisclosed piece of the City Girls smash “Act Up,” or producing a chunk of Drake and 21 Savage’s Her Loss , or logging an unlikely chart hit about sneaking promethazine through customs . He’s a lightning rod for guys who see a new wave of absurdists and crooners as a displacement of rap traditionalism (rather than a continuation of a detailed history within it); he knows what the fans are into and where they’re getting into it online, so accusations about his music ruining hip-hop are complicated by every unforeseen success. The work varies greatly in style as well as quality, but being difficult to pin down also buys him freedom to make unusual plays.

Let’s Start Here , his fifth album and first full-length excursion into psychedelic rock, didn’t spawn entirely from nowhere, and not just because it sprung a leak under the name Sonic Beach a few weeks back. His appearance on a remix for Tame Impala’s Slow Rush jam “Breathe Deeper” hits a few of the markers the new album visits: the taste for psychotropic drugs and the interaction between the shimmering sound achieved by an elaborate pedal board and raps that feel both lightly thought through and also spirited and spontaneous. The first song, “The Black Seminole,” outlines the project’s guiding ethos, from its burbling, delay-drenched analog-synthesizer sound to the trippy changes and show-stopping vocal performance by “Bad Habit” co-writer Diana Gordon — all of which amount to an attempt to jam every idea housed in Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon into a single seven-minute performance. Bolstered by memorable spots from Gordon (who gives the Clare Torry screams in “Failure” and “Seminole” her all), Fousheé (whose softCORE album served rockers like “Die” and “Bored” that share Yachty’s love of walls of noise), and Justine Skye, the new album makes more space for women in its love songs than most rappers percolating on the charts tend to care to now. (Note also the presence of one Daystar Peterson in the credits as a co-writer on “Paint the Sky.”)

Let’s Start Here journeys back in time and out to space and sometimes up its own ass. It’s a drug odyssey that delightfully defies expectations whenever it’s not overindulging, taking its adulation for its influences from pastiche to parody, pushing its sound from psych to cacophony. Much will be made of Kevin Parker’s impact here, because Tame is also a project about savvily jumbling ideas from other eras and getting synthesizers to feel as delicately enveloping as puffs of smoke. It’s also an oversimplification of the scope of Let’s Start Here to call it Lil Yachty’s Tame album. Patrick Wimberly co-produced every song, and the snap of the drum sound and the flair for gooey horn accompaniment are assets Chairlift — Wimberly’s former group with Caroline Polachek and Aaron Pfenning — used to employ. U.K. producer Jam City and Yves Tumor collaborator Justin Raisen sat in on a lot of these, too; the maximalist sonics and the mix of love songs and acid-addled horror here are both a result of its pick of personnel and an authentic re-creation of the wild fluctuations of a lurid trip.

Its intriguing bio- and band chemistry are Let’s Start Here ’s gift and curse. “Running Out of Time” kicks off with drums that feel like Thundercat’s “Them Changes” (which, in turn, feels like Paul McCartney’s “Arrow Through Me”) and a bubbly bass line evoking “Lovely Day” by Bill Withers. Pushing through to a gorgeous bridge, matching vocals with Skye, Yachty pokes out from under the shadow of his forebears and delivers one of the finest bits of music he’s ever made. The blissed out “The Ride” plants the Texas rapper Teezo Touchdown into a wobbly groove that could’ve fit into last year’s Yeah Yeah Yeahs album. It feels like both songs could collapse at any moment, hanging a sharp turn into an unflattering section wrecking the momentum they built. Equally prone to swift tense shifts and long detours, Let’s Start Here meanders a great deal between highlights, raining sheets of sound that soak and weigh down the delicate grooves it’s trying to build. “Paint the Sky” sounds like a radio hit dropped into a flooded pit cave. These songs sink or swim on Lil Yachty’s ability to steady himself amid a maelstrom of phase-shifted guitars, delay-kissed drums, and synths shrouded in reverb. He’s a good study and a great hook man, but the novelty of some of his experiments wear off as ideas repeat and choruses get smothered. The less they tinker, the better.

Restraint guides Let’s Start Here to a few of its most sublime moments. “Pretty” will draw comparisons to Childish Gambino’s Awaken My Love! and the hit slow jam “Redbone,” but the drum programming recalls the stuff Prince did with the LinnDrum and the vocal performances feel inspired by cloud rap, a sensibility teased out in a cocky, carefree verse by Fousheé . “Say Something” strikes gold coolly poking around the pillowy synth pads and echoing drums of ’80s pop in the same way recent albums from the Weeknd picked up where Daft Punk left off in marrying dueling interests in 20th- and 21st-century popular music. “Pretty” and “Say Something” keep things relatively simple, stacking a few complementary ideas on top of each other and allowing space to breathe. (Other producers might abuse the clav hits in the latter for the old-school feel they bring, but this group lets them drift in and out of frame, recalling the minimalist trap lullabies on the back end of Lil Boat .) The noisier and less structurally sturdy cuts that surround them feel like the jams a band works through on the way to more refined compositions, before taking them on the road where they grow new layers of sound and significance. Let’s Start Here begs to be untangled in a live setting the way artists drawn to the tactile and communal experience of music tend to, allowed to drift over warm air, playing during the sunny days and reckless nights it describes.

Maybe this album is the new beginning its title implies, a first step toward tighter songcraft on the horizon, and maybe Yachty will pop back up in six to 18 months’ time on some different shit entirely, as is often his tendency. The new record finds him sniffing around the same intersections of pop, rock, psych, and soul as “Bad Habit” or Frank Ocean’s “Pretty Sweet,” sacrificing the brevity of his hits for a purposeful sensory overload, which sometimes works in his favor but sometimes encumbers tracks that ought to seem weightless. It is important for young artists to get the space to grow and change and eat mushrooms and make weird but enthusiastic indie-rock music.

Let’s Start Here fits into a long tradition of pleasant curveballs from rappers, unheralded classics like Q-Tip’s Kamaal the Abstract, side projects like the Beastie Boys and Suicidal Tendencies offshoot BS2000 , imperfect genre excursions like Kid Cudi’s WZRD , and effortless R&B pivots like Tyler, the Creator’s Igor . Yachty is stumbling down well-trod pathways, learning lessons imparted on generation after generation of listeners ever since Pink Floyd’s international breakthrough 50 years ago and taking metaphysical journeys endeavored since humans first discovered fungi and plants that made them see sounds and smell colors. The sharpest songs here could go toe-to-toe with the best in the artist’s back catalog, and the worst ones sound like excitable demos for various guitar pedals. Let’s Start Here isn’t Lil Yachty’s greatest work, but it goes over better than the pitch — “Poland” guy does shrooms and jams on instruments — implied it might. And if shoegaze-adjacent rockers like “I’ve Officially Lost Vision” and sound experiments like the one at the end of “We Saw the Sun” drone-pill even a fraction of the audience, it was all worth it.

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Lil Yachty – Let’s Start Here. (Album Review)

This might be the one for Lil Yachty.

Honorable mention. reach the sunshine., “reach the sunshine.” is a five-star track. why didn’t it make my top 5 because i’m stupid, that’s why..

From a quality standpoint, no other song on this album is touching “REACH THE SUNSHINE.” It is gorgeously structureless, extremely hypnotizing, and impressively organic. The song blends hip-hop elements, rock elements, and classical elements ingeniously. “REACH THE SUNSHINE.” doesn’t have a future in nightclubs; it has a future in Fantasia 2.

5. sAy sOMETHING

Remember when we used to make fun of high school simps that listened to music like this who are the fools now.

So, Lil Yachty’s vocals in “sAy sOMETHING” aren’t amazing, but I think that his passion (Which everyone should respect) carries him to the finish line of the song. He really does a good job of creating a sound that brings out his vulnerable, youthful, and charming side. Yachty literally gives all of his heart to his woman here; let’s pray that she doesn’t have Dak Prescott’s throwing arm.

4. running out of time

Who knew yachty had some childish gambino in him (please don’t take this sentence literally).

“running out of time” just feels like the kind of track Childish Gambino would slaughter. It features Kaytranada-like production (Which Gambino loves) and a vintage sound that the Atlanta actor flirted with quite a bit in the past. While Yachty doesn’t quite sound like Gambino vocally in the song (That’s probably an understatement), I do think that the flair he sings with is comparable. I also think he fully understood the kind of melodies and bridges the production needed. Yachty understood the assignment here.

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3. the ride-

My soul went for the greatest f**king cruise ever while i was listening to “the ride-.”.

You can’t call yourself a true music fan if you don’t appreciate all of this song’s elements (Besides Yachty’s vocals). “the ride-” is a trippy, crafty, utopian, slick, romantic, Homeboys in Outer Space-Esque experience that you will need 3D glasses for to fully enjoy. Your Tesla can’t take you for a ride like this!

2. The Alchemist

Remember when we used to make fun of emo-white kids that listened to music like this who are the broccoli-with-cheese-eating dummies now.

Remember when we were kids and would jump on our parent’s bed while they were at work, but immediately ran to our rooms and acted like we were peacefully doing our homework when they got back home? This song feels like the musical version of that situation. “The Alchemist” has two sounds: A tumultuous/stormy one courtesy of Lil Yachty, and a sparkly/gentle one courtesy of Fousheé. The way the two sounds meld, creating an experience that only folks who do HIIT workouts can relate to, is f**king rad (Yes, I used the word rad here).

I don’t know why, but this song made me a little emotional. Underdog, give this f**king song 5 stars!

1. drive ME crazy!

Remember when we used to make fun of our parents when they would almost tear their acls dancing to music like this who are the prune juice-drinking fools now.

“drive ME crazy!” is my kind of s**t! Y’all can keep the “smoking on that *insert name* pack” music. First and foremost, kudos must go to the unbelievable performance featured guest Diana Gordon puts up on the song. It sounds replenishing, invigorating, and nostalgic in the most youthful way possible. Kudos must also go to the bloomy/funky/synth-heavy production and Yachty’s slick, I-am-only-doing-this-because-my-girl-told-me-I-had-to contributions.

SONG BY SONG BREAKDOWN

1. the BLACK seminole. (4/5)

2. the ride- (4.5/5)

3. running out of time (3.5/5)

4. pRETTy (3.5/5)

5. :(failure(: (N/A)

6. THE zone~ (4/5)

7. WE SAW THE SUN (3.5/5)

8. drive ME crazy! (5/5)

9. IVE OFFICIALLY LOST ViSiON!!!!! (4/5)

10. sAy sOMETHINg (4/5)

11. paint THE sky (4/5)

12. sHouLd i B? (4/5)

13. The Alchemist. (5/5)

14. REACH THE SUNSHINE. (5/5)

Wow, Lil Yachty went left field with this album and succeeded.

I absolutely love it when artists refuse to be shoved in boxes. When Lil Yachty first emerged onto the music scene, he was dropping hard-hitting rap verses here and there, but he always made it a mission to show the world that he was into numerous genres. While he never went full-blown with his experimenting in the past, I always had an inkling that he wanted to at some point. In this album, Yachty does just that.

Let’s Start Here is more psychedelic rock than trap hip-hop. More daring than safe. More vintage-sounding than trendy. More elaborate than basic. More Patrick Mahomes than game manager. More Chrisean Rock with Blueface than Chrisean Rock with nobody. While I wouldn’t say that Yachty’s vocal performances on the album are anything close to Mariah Carey’s level (His voice still makes me a little queasy), I do applaud him for finding the most complex/fearless routes singing-wise to make it to the finish line of tracks.

You can’t tell me that Yachty wasn’t cooking up these tracks with Tame Impala, Kaytranada, and Beethoven. I love how intimately rebellious, multi-layered, hazy, intoxicating, romantic, and/or nostalgic each song sounds. The album forces your ears to both engage and think beyond your workout playlists. If we’re going to praise Shaq for making jump shots, your relatives for making steak instead of Turkey for Thanksgiving, and Joe Biden for learning how to use Twitter, we need to praise musicians when they tap into sounds that are really f**king hard to conquer.

Quincy is the creator of Ratings Game Music. He loves writing about music, taking long walks on beaches, and spaghetti that fights him back.

6 responses to “Lil Yachty – Let’s Start Here. (Album Review)”

Respectfully, pRETTy is probably my favorite song in the album

So many people like that track. I do think it’s very good too. I’m not mad at it!

what the hell man

[…] honest with you when I tell you that I think Lil Yachty has the album of the year thus far. Let’s Start Here. is so good, it made me forgive him for making the GOD-awful “Poland.” With that being […]

[…] Yachty might have secured the album of the year title with Let’s Start Here. If you had mentioned this back in 2017, I would’ve respectfully slapped you. What really […]

[…] might be the MVP of this rap s**t this year. At the top of it, he dropped a fantastic album in Let’s Start Here. Since then, he has dropped a hot-ass project with JID and some very good singles such as […]

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Lil Yachty On His Big Rock Pivot: ‘F-ck Any of the Albums I Dropped Before This One’

With his adventurous, psychedelic new album, 'Let's Start Here,' he's left mumble rap behind — and finally created a project he's proud of.

By Lyndsey Havens

Lyndsey Havens

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Lil Yachty, presented by Doritos, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW on March 16 .

Lil Yachty: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot

Someone has sparked a blunt in the planetarium.

It may be a school night, but no one has come to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., to learn. Instead, the hundreds of fans packed into the domed theater on Jan. 26 have come to hear Lil Yachty’s latest album as he intended: straight through — and with an open mind. Or, as Yachty says with a mischievous smile: “I hope y’all took some sh-t.”

For the next 57 minutes and 16 seconds, graphics of exploding spaceships, green giraffes and a quiet road through Joshua Tree National Park accompany Yachty’s sonically divergent — and at this point, unreleased — fifth album, Let’s Start Here . For a psychedelic rock project that plays like one long song, the visual aids not only help attendees embrace the bizarre, but also function as a road map for Yachty’s far-out trip, signaling that there is, in fact, a tracklist.

It’s a night the artist has arguably been waiting for his whole career — to finally release an album he feels proud of. An album that was, he says, made “from scratch” with all live instrumentation. An album that opens with a nearly seven-minute opus, “the BLACK seminole.,” that he claims he had to fight most of his collaborative team to keep as one, not two songs. An album that, unlike his others, has few features and is instead rich with co-writers like Mac DeMarco, Nick Hakim, Alex G and members of MGMT, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Chairlift. An album he believes will finally earn him the respect and recognition he has always sought.

Sitting in a Brooklyn studio in East Williamsburg not far from where he made most of Let’s Start Here in neighboring Greenpoint, it’s clear he has been waiting to talk about this project in depth for some time. Yachty is an open book, willing to answer anything — and share any opinion. (Especially on the slice of pizza he has been brought, which he declares “tastes like ass.”) Perhaps his most controversial take at the moment? “F-ck any of the albums I dropped before this one.”

His desire to move on from his past is understandable. When Yachty entered the industry in his mid-teens with his 2016 major-label debut, the Lil Boat mixtape, featuring the breakout hit “One Night,” he found that along with fame came sailing the internet’s choppy waters. Skeptics often took him to task for not knowing — or caring, maybe — about rap’s roots, and he never shied away from sharing hot takes on Twitter. With his willingness and ability to straddle pop and hip-hop, Yachty produced music he once called “bubble-gum trap” (he has since denounced that phrase) that polarized audiences and critics. Meanwhile, his nonchalant delivery got him labeled as a mumble rapper — another identifier he was never fond of because it felt dismissive of his talent.

“There’s a lot of kids who haven’t heard any of my references,” he continues. “They don’t know anything about Bon Iver or Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath or James Brown. I wanted to show people a different side of me — and that I can do anything, most importantly.”

Let’s Start Here is proof. Growing up in Atlanta, the artist born Miles McCollum was heavily influenced by his father, a photographer who introduced him to all kinds of sounds. Yachty, once easily identifiable by his bright red braids, found early success by posting songs like “One Night” to SoundCloud, catching the attention of Kevin “Coach K” Lee, co-founder/COO of Quality Control Music, now home to Migos, Lil Baby and City Girls. In 2015, Coach K began managing Yachty, who in summer 2016 signed a joint-venture deal with Motown, Capitol Records and Quality Control.

“Yachty was me when I was 18 years old, when I signed him. He was actually me,” says Coach K today. (In 2021, Adam Kluger, whose clients include Bhad Bhabie, began co-managing Yachty.) “All the eclectic, different things, we shared that with each other. He had been wanting to make this album from the first day we signed him. But you know — coming as a hip-hop artist, you have to play the game.”

Yachty played it well. To date, he has charted 17 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 , including two top 10 hits for his features on DRAM’s melodic 2016 smash “Broccoli” and Kyle’s 2017 pop-rap track “iSpy.” His third-highest-charting entry arrived unexpectedly last year: the 93-second “Poland,” a track Yachty recorded in about 10 minutes where his warbly vocals more closely resemble singing than rapping. ( Let’s Start Here collaborator SADPONY saw “Poland” as a temperature check that proved “people are going to like this Yachty.”)

Beginning with 2016’s Lil Boat mixtape, all eight of Yachty’s major-label-released albums and mixtapes have charted on the Billboard 200 . Three have entered the top 10, including Let’s Start Here , which debuted and peaked at No. 9. And while Yachty has only scored one No. 1 album before ( Teenage Emotions topped Rap Album Sales), Let’s Start Here debuted atop three genre charts: Top Rock & Alternative Albums , Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums .

“It feels good to know that people in that world received this so well,” says Motown Records vp of A&R Gelareh Rouzbehani. “I think it’s a testament to Yachty going in and saying, ‘F-ck what everyone thinks. I’m going to create something that I’ve always wanted to make — and let us hope the world f-cking loves it.’ ”

Yet despite Let’s Start Here ’s many high-profile supporters, some longtime detractors and fans alike were quick to criticize certain aspects of it, from its art — Yachty quote-tweeted one remark , succinctly replying, “shut up” — to the music itself. Once again, he found himself facing another tidal wave of discourse. But this time, he was ready to ride it. “This release,” Kluger says, “gave him a lot of confidence.”

“I was always kind of nervous to put out music, but now I’m on some other sh-t,” Yachty says. “It was a lot of self-assessing and being very real about not being happy with where I was musically, knowing I’m better than where I am. Because the sh-t I was making did not add up to the sh-t I listened to.

“I just wanted more,” he continues. “I want to be remembered. I want to be respected.”

Last spring, Lil Yachty gathered his family, collaborators and team at famed Texas studio complex Sonic Ranch.

“I remember I got there at night and drove down because this place is like 30 miles outside El Paso,” Coach K says. “I walked in the room and just saw all these instruments and sh-t, and the vibe was just so ill. And I just started smiling. All the producers were in the room, his assistant, his dad. Yachty comes in, puts the album on. We got to the second song, and I told everybody, ‘Stop the music.’ I walked over to him and just said, ‘Man, give me a hug.’ I was like, ‘Yachty, I am so proud of you.’ He came into the game bold, but [to make] this album, you have to be very bold. And to know that he finally did it, it was overwhelming.”

SADPONY (aka Jeremiah Raisen) — who executive-produced Let’s Start Here and, in doing so, spent nearly eight straight months with Yachty — says the time at Sonic Ranch was the perfect way to cap off the months of tunnel vision required while making the album in Brooklyn. “That was new alone,” says Yachty. “I’ve recorded every album in Atlanta at [Quality Control]. That was the first time I recorded away from home. First time I recorded with a new engineer,” Miles B.A. Robinson, a Saddle Creek artist.

Yachty couldn’t wait to put it out, and says he turned it in “a long time ago. I think it was just label sh-t and trying to figure out the right time to release it.” For Coach K, it was imperative to have the physical product ready on release date, given that Yachty had made “an experience” of an album. And lately, most pressing plants have an average turnaround time of six to eight months.

Fans, however, were impatient. On Christmas, one month before Let’s Start Here would arrive, the album leaked online. It was dubbed Sonic Ranch . “Everyone was home with their families, so no one could pull it off the internet,” recalls Yachty. “That was really depressing and frustrating.”

Then, weeks later, the album art, tracklist and release date also leaked. “My label made a mistake and sent preorders to Amazon too early, and [the site] posted it,” Yachty says. “So I wasn’t able to do the actual rollout for my album that I wanted to. Nothing was a secret anymore. It was all out. I had a whole plan that I had to cancel.” He says the biggest loss was various videos he made to introduce and contextualize the project, all of which “were really weird … [But] I wasn’t introducing it anymore. People already knew.” Only one, called “Department of Mental Tranquility,” made it out, just days before the album.

Yachty says he wasn’t necessarily seeking a mental escape before making Let’s Start Here , but confesses that acid gave him one anyway. “I guess maybe the music went along with it,” he says. The album title changed four or five times, he says, from Momentary Bliss (“It was meant to take you away from reality … where you’re truly listening”) to 180 Degrees (“Because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, but people were like, ‘It’s too on the nose’ ”) to, ultimately, Let’s Start Here — the best way, he decided, to succinctly summarize where he was as an artist: a seven-year veteran, but at 25 years old, still eager to begin a new chapter.

Taking inspiration from Dark Side , Yachty relied on three women’s voices throughout the album, enlisting Fousheé, Justine Skye and Diana Gordon. Otherwise, guest vocals are spare. Daniel Caesar features on album closer “Reach the Sunshine.,” while the late Bob Ross (of The Joy of Painting fame) has a historic posthumous feature on “We Saw the Sun!”

Rouzbehani tells Billboard that Ross’ estate declined Yachty’s request at first: “I think a big concern of theirs was that Yachty is known as a rapper, and Bob Ross and his brand are very clean. They didn’t want to associate with anything explicit.” But Yachty was adamant, and Rouzbehani played the track for Ross’ team and also sent the entire album’s lyrics to set the group at ease. “With a lot of back-and-forth, we got the call,” she says. “Yachty is the first artist that has gotten a Bob Ross clearance in history.”

From the start, Coach K believed Let’s Start Here would open lots of doors for Yachty — and ultimately, other artists, too. Questlove may have said it best, posting the album art on Instagram with a lengthy caption that read in part: “this lp might be the most surprising transition of any music career I’ve witnessed in a min, especially under the umbrella of hip hop … Sh-t like this (envelope pushing) got me hyped about music’s future.”

Recently, Lil Yachty held auditions for an all-women touring band. “It was an experience for like Simon Cowell or Randy [Jackson],” he says, offering a simple explanation for the choice: “In my life, women are superheroes.”

And according to Yachty, pulling off his show will take superhuman strength: “Because the show has to match the album. It has to be big.” As eager as he was to release Let’s Start Here , he’s even more antsy to perform it live — but planning a tour, he says, required gauging the reaction to it. “This is so new for me, and to be quite honest with you, the label [didn’t] know how [the album] would do,” he says. “Also, I haven’t dropped an album in like three years. So we don’t even know how to plan a tour right now because it has been so long and my music is so different.”

While Yachty’s last full-length studio album, Lil Boat 3 , arrived in 2020, he released the Michigan Boy Boat mixtape in 2021, a project as reverential of the state’s flourishing hip-hop scenes in Detroit and Flint as Let’s Start Here is of its psych-rock touchstones. And though he claims he doesn’t do much with his days, his recent accomplishments, both musical and beyond, suggest otherwise. He launched his own cryptocurrency, YachtyCoin, at the end of 2020; signed his first artist, Draft Day, to his Concrete Boyz label at the start of 2021; invested in the Jewish dating app Lox Club; and launched his own line of frozen pizza, Yachty’s Pizzeria, last September. (He has famously declared he has never eaten a vegetable; at his Jersey City listening event, there was an abundance of candy, doughnut holes and Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts.)

But there are only two things that seem to remotely excite him, first and foremost of which is being a father. As proud as he is of Let’s Start Here , he says it comes in second to having his now 1-year-old daughter — though he says with a laugh that she “doesn’t really give a f-ck” about his music yet. “I haven’t played [this album] for her, but her mom plays her my old stuff,” he continues. “The mother of my child is Dominican and Puerto Rican, so she loves Selena — she plays her a lot . [We watch] the Selena movie with Jennifer Lopez a sh-t ton and a lot of Disney movie sh-t, like Frozen , Lion King and that type of vibe.”

Aside from being a dad, he most cares about working with other artists. Recently, he flew eight of his biggest fans — most of whom he has kept in touch with for years — to Atlanta. He had them over, played Let’s Start Here , took them to dinner and bowling, introduced them to his mom and dad, and then showed them a documentary he made for the album. (He’s not sure if he’ll release it.) One of the fans is an aspiring rapper; naturally, the two made a song together.

Yachty wants to keep working with artists and producers outside of hip-hop, mentioning the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and even sharing his dream of writing a ballad for Elton John. (“I know I could write him a beautiful song.”) With South Korean music company HYBE’s recent purchase of Quality Control — a $300 million deal — Yachty’s realm of possibility is bigger than ever.

But he’s not ruling out his genre roots. Arguably, Let’s Start Here was made for the peers and heroes he played it for first — and was inspired by hip-hop’s chameleons. “I would love to do a project with Tyler [The Creator],” says Yachty. “He’s the reason I made this album. He’s the one who told me to do it, just go for it. He’s so confident and I have so much respect for him because he takes me seriously, and he always has.”

Penske Media Corp. is the largest shareholder of SXSW ; its brands are official media partners of SXSW.

This story originally appeared in the March 11, 2023, issue of Billboard.

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Music Features

Lil yachty's delightfully absurd path to 'let's start here'.

Matthew Ramirez

LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 29: Lil Yachty performs on the Stage during day 2 of Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival 2017 at Exposition Park on October 29, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. Rich Fury/Getty Images hide caption

LOS ANGELES, CA - OCTOBER 29: Lil Yachty performs on the Stage during day 2 of Camp Flog Gnaw Carnival 2017 at Exposition Park on October 29, 2017 in Los Angeles, California.

Lil Yachty often worked better as an idea than a rapper. The late-decade morass of grifters like Lil Pump, amidst the self-serious reign of Future and Drake (eventual Yachty collaborators, for what it's worth), created a demand for something lighter, someone charismatic, a throwback to a time in the culture when characters like Biz Markie could score a hit or Kool Keith could sustain a career in one hyper-specific lane of rap fandom. Yachty fulfilled the role: His introduction to many was through a comedy skit soundtracked by his viral breakout "1 Night," which tapped into the song's deadpan delivery and was the perfect complement for its sleepy charm. The casual fan knows him best for a pair of collaborations in 2016: as one-half of the zeitgeist-defining single "Broccoli" with oddity D.R.A.M., or "iSpy," a top-five pop hit with backpack rapper Kyle. Yachty embodied the rapper as larger-than-life character — from his candy-colored braids to his winning smile — and while the songs themselves were interesting, you could be forgiven for wondering if there was anything substantial behind the fun, the grounds for the start of a long career.

As if to supplement his résumé, Yachty seemed to emerge as a multimedia star. Perhaps you remember him in a Target commercial; heard him during the credits for the Saved by the Bell reboot; spotted him on a cereal box; saw him co-starring in the ill-fated 2019 sequel to How High . TikTok microcelebrity followed. Then the sentences got more and more absurd: Chef Boyardee jingle with Donny Osmond; nine-minute video cosplaying as Oprah; lead actor in an UNO card game movie. Somewhere in a cross-section of pop-culture detritus and genuine hit-making talent is where Yachty resides. That he didn't fade away immediately is a testament to his charm as a cultural figure; Yachty satisfied a need, and in his refreshingly low-stakes appeal, you could imagine him as an MTV star in an alternate universe. Move the yardstick of cultural cachet from album sales to likes and he emerges as a generation-defining persona, if not musician.

Early success and exposure can threaten anyone's career, none so much as those connected to the precarious phenomenon of SoundCloud rap. Yachty's initial peak perhaps seeded his desire years later to sincerely pursue artistry with Let's Start Here , an album fit for his peculiar trajectory, because throughout the checks from Sprite and scolding Ebro interviews he never stopped releasing music, seemingly to satisfy no one other than himself and the generation of misfits that he seemed to be speaking for.

But to oversell him as a personality belittles his substantial catalog. Early mixtapes like Lil Boat and Summer Songs 2 , which prophetically brought rap tropes and pop sounds into harmony, were sustained by the teenage artist's commitment to selling the vibe of a track as he warbled its memorable hook. It was perhaps his insistence to demonstrate that he could rap, too, that most consistently pockmarked his output during this period. These misses were the necessary growing pains of a kid still finding his footing, and through time and persistence, a perceived weakness became a strength. Where his peers Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti found new ways to express themselves in music, Yachty dug in his heels and became Quality Control's oddball representative, acquitting himself on guest appearances and graduating from punchline rapper to respectable vet culminating in the dense and rewarding Lil Boat 3 from 2020, Yachty's last official album.

Which is why the buzzy, viral "Poland" from the end of 2022 hit different — Yachty tapped back into the same lively tenor of his early breakthroughs. The vibrato was on ten, the beat menaced and hummed like a broken heater, he rapped about taking cough syrup in Poland, it was over in under two minutes and endlessly replayable. Yachty has already lived a full career arc in seven years — from the 2016 king of the teens, to budding superstar, to pitchman, to regional ambassador. But following "Poland" with self-aware attempts at similar virality would be a mistake, and you can't pivot your way to radio stardom after a hit like that, unless you're a marketing genius like Lil Nas X. How does he follow up his improbable second chance to grab the zeitgeist?

#NowPlaying

Lil yachty, 'poland'.

Let's Start Here is Lil Yachty's reinvention, a born-again Artist's Statement with no rapping. It's billed as psychedelic rock but has a decidedly accessible sound — the sun-kissed warmth of an agreeable Tame Impala song, with bounce-house rhythms and woozy guitars in the mode of Magdalena Bay and Mac DeMarco (both of whom guest on the album) — something that's not quite challenging but satisfying nonetheless. Contrast with 2021's Michigan Boy Boat , where Yachty performed as tour guide through Michigan rap: His presence was auxiliary by function on that tape, as he ceded the floor to Babyface Ray, Sada Baby and Rio Da Yung OG; it was tantalizing curation, if not a work of his own personal artistry. It's tempting to cast Let's Start Here as another act of roleplay, but what holds this album together is Yachty's magnetic pull. Whether or not you're someone who voluntarily listens to the Urban Outfitters-approved slate of artists he's drawing upon, his star presence is what keeps you engaged here.

Yachty has been in the studio recording this album since 2021, and the effort is tangible. He didn't chase "Poland" with more goofy novelties, but he also didn't spit this record out in a month. Opener (and highlight) "The Black Seminole" alternates between Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix-lite references. It's definitely a gauntlet thrown even if halfway through you start to wonder where Yachty is. The album's production team mostly consists of Patrick Wemberly (formerly of Chairlift), Jacob Portrait (of Unknown Mortal Orchestra), Jeremiah Raisen (who's produced for Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira and Drake) and Yachty himself, who's established himself as a talented producer since his early days. (MGMT's Ben Goldwasser also contributed.) The group does a formidable job composing music that is dense and layered enough to register as formally unconventional, if not exactly boundary-pushing. Yachty frequently reaches for his "Poland"-inspired uber-vibrato, which adds a bewitching texture to the songs, placing him in the center of the track. Other moments that work: the spoken-word interlude "Failure," thanks to contemplative strumming from Alex G, and "The Ride," a warm slow-burn that coasts on a Jam City beat, giving the album a lustrous Night Slugs moment. "I've Officially Lost Vision" thrashes like Yves Tumor.

Yet the best songs on Let's Start Here push Yachty's knack for hooks and snaking melodies to the fore and rely less on studio fireworks — the laid-back groove of "Running Out of Time," the mournful post-punk of "Should I B?" and the slow burn of "Pretty," which features a bombastic turn from vocalist Foushee. That Yachty's vaunted indie collaborators were able to work in simpatico with him proves his left-of-center bonafides. It's a reminder that he's often lined his projects with successful non-rap songs, curios like "Love Me Forever" from Lil Boat 2 and "Worth It" from Nuthin' 2 Prove . That renders Let's Start Here a less startling turn than it may appear at first glance, and also underlines his recurring talent for making off-kilter pop music, a gift no matter the perceived genre.

At a listening event for the record, Yachty stated: "I created [this] because I really wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. Not just some SoundCloud rapper, not some mumble rapper. Not some guy that just made one hit," seemingly aware of the culture war within his own genre and his place along the spectrum of low- to highbrow. To be sure, whether conscious of it or not, this kind of mentality is dismissive of rap music as an artform, and also undermines the good music Yachty has made in the past. Holing up in the studio to make digestibly "weird" indie-rock with a cast of talented white people isn't intrinsically more artistic or valid than viral hits or a one-off like "Poland." But this statement scans less as self-loathing and more as a renewed confidence, a tribute to the album's collective vision. And people like Joe Budden have been saying "I don't think Yachty is hip-hop " since he started. So what if he wants to break rank now?

Lil Yachty entered the cultural stage at 18, and has grown up in public. It adds up that, now 25, he would internalize all the scrutiny he's received and wish to cement his artistry after a few thankless years rewriting the rules for young, emerging rappers. Let's Start Here may not be the transcendent psychedelic rock album that he seeks, but it is reflective of an era of genreless "vibes" music. Many young listeners likely embraced Yachty and Tame Impala simultaneously; it tracks he would want to bring these sounds together in a genuine attempt to reach a wider audience. Nothing about this album is cynical, but it is opportunistic, a creation in line with both a shameless mixed-media existence and his everchanging pop alchemy. The "genre" tag in streaming metadata means less than it ever has. Credit to Yachty for putting that knowledge to use.

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How Lil Yachty Ended Up at His Excellent New Psychedelic Album Let's Start Here

The evening before Lil Yachty released his fifth studio album,  Let’s Start Here,  he  gathered an IMAX theater’s worth of his fans and famous friends at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City and made something clear: He wanted to be taken seriously. Not just as a “Soundcloud rapper, not some mumble rapper, not some guy that just made one hit,” he told the crowd before pressing play on his album. “I wanted to be taken serious because music is everything to me.” 

There’s a spotty history of rappers making dramatic stylistic pivots, a history Yachty now joins with  Let’s Start Here,  a funk-flecked psychedelic rock album. But unlike other notable rap-to-rock faceplants—Kid Cudi’s  Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven  comes to mind, as does Lil Wayne’s  Rebirth —the record avoids hackneyed pastiche and gratuitous playacting and cash-grabbing crossover singles; instead, Yachty sounds unbridled and free, a rapper creatively liberated from the strictures of mainstream hip-hop. Long an oddball who’s delighted in defying traditional rap ethos and expectations,  Let’s Start Here  is a maximalist and multi-genre undertaking that rewrites the narrative of Yachty’s curious career trajectory. 

Admittedly, it’d be easy to write off the album as Tame Impala karaoke, a gimmicky record from a guy who heard Yves Tumor once and thought: Let’s do  that . But set aside your Yachty skepticism and probe the album’s surface a touch deeper. While the arrangements tend toward the obvious, the record remains an intricate, unraveling swell of sumptuous live instruments and reverb-drenched textures made more impressive by the fact that Yachty co-produced every song. Fielding support from an all-star cast of characters, including production work from former Chairlift member Patrick Wimberly, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Jacob Portrait, Justin Raisen, Nick Hakim, and Magdalena Bay, and vocals from Daniel Caesar, Diana Gordon,  Foushée , Justine Skye, and Teezo Touchdown, Yachty surrounds himself with a group of disparately talented collaborators. You can hear the acute attention to detail and wide-scale ambition in the spaced-out denouement on “We Saw the Sun!” or on the blistering terror of “I’ve Officially Lost Vision!!!!” or during the cool romanticism of “Say Something.” Though occasionally overindulgent,  Let’s Start Here  is a spectacular statement from hip-hop’s prevailing weirdo. It’s not shocking that Yachty took another hard left—but how exactly did he end up  here ?

In 2016, as the forefather of “bubblegum trap” ascended into mainstream consciousness, an achievement like  Let’s Start Here  would’ve seemed inconceivable. The then 18-year-old Yachty gained national attention when a pair of his songs, “One Night” and “Minnesota,” went viral. Though clearly indebted to hip-hop trailblazers Lil B, Chief Keef, and Young Thug, his work instantly stood apart from the gritted-teeth toughness of his Atlanta trap contemporaries. Yachty flaunted a childlike awe and cartoonish demeanor that communicated a swaggering, unbothered cool. His singsong flows and campy melodies contained a winking humor to them, a subversive playfulness that endeared him to a generation of very online kids who saw themselves in Yachty’s goofy, eccentric persona. He starred in Sprite  commercials alongside LeBron James, performed live shows at the  Museum of Modern Art , and modeled in Kanye West’s  Life of Pablo  listening event at Madison Square Garden. Relishing in his cultural influence, he declared to the  New York Times  that he was not a rapper but an  artist. “And I’m more than an artist,” he added. “I’m a brand.”

 As Sheldon Pearce pointed out in his Pitchfork  review of Yachty’s 2016 mixtape,  Lil Boat , “There isn’t a single thing Lil Yachty’s doing that someone else isn’t doing better, and in richer details.” He wasn’t wrong. While Yachty’s songs were charming and catchy (and, sometimes, convincing), his music was often tangential to his brand. What was the point of rapping as sharply as the Migos or singing as intensely as Trippie Redd when you’d inked deals with Nautica and Target, possessed a sixth-sense for going viral, and had incoming collaborations with Katy Perry and Carly Rae Jepsen? What mattered more was his presentation: the candy-red hair and beaded braids, the spectacular smile that showed rows of rainbow-bedazzled grills, the wobbly, weak falsetto that defaulted to a chintzy nursery rhyme cadence. He didn’t need technical ability or historical reverence to become a celebrity; he was a meme brought to life, the personification of hip-hop’s growing generational divide, a sudden star who, like so many other Soundcloud acts, seemed destined to crash and burn after a fleeting moment in the sun.

 One problem: the music wasn’t very good. Yachty’s debut album, 2017’s  Teenage Emotions, was a glitter-bomb of pop-rap explorations that floundered with shaky hooks and schmaltzy swings at crossover hits. Worse, his novelty began to fade, those sparkly, cheerful, and puerile bubblegum trap songs aging like day-old french fries. Even when he hued closer to hard-nosed rap on 2018’s  Lil Boat 2  and  Nuthin’ 2 Prove,  you could feel Yachty desperate to recapture the magic that once came so easily to him. But rap years are like dog years, and by 2020, Yachty no longer seemed so radically weird. He was an established rapper making mid mainstream rap. The only question now was whether we’d already seen the best of him.

If his next moves were any indication—writing the  theme song to the  Saved by the Bell  sitcom revival and announcing his involvement in an upcoming  movie based on the card game Uno—then the answer was yes. But in April 2021, Yachty dropped  Michigan Boat Boy,  a mixtape that saw him swapping conventional trap for Detroit and Flint’s fast-paced beats and plain-spoken flows. Never fully of a piece with his Atlanta colleagues, Yachty found a cohort of kindred spirits in Michigan, a troop of rappers whose humor, imagination, and debauchery matched his own. From the  looks of it, leaders in the scene like Babyface Ray, Rio Da Yung OG, and YN Jay embraced Yachty with open arms, and  Michigan Boat Boy  thrives off that communion. 

 Then “ Poland ” happened. When Yachty uploaded the minute-and-a-half long track to Soundcloud a few months back, he received an unlikely and much needed jolt. Building off the rage rap production he played with on the  Birthday Mix 6  EP, “Poland” finds Yachty’s warbling about carrying pharmaceutical-grade cough syrup across international borders, a conceit that captured the imagination of TikTok and beyond. Recorded as a joke and released only after a leaked version went viral, the song has since amassed over a hundred-millions streams across all platforms. With his co-production flourishes (and adlibs) splattered across Drake and 21 Savage’s  Her Loss,  fans had reason to believe that Yachty’s creative potential had finally clicked into focus.

 But  Let’s Start Here  sounds nothing like “Poland”—in fact, the song doesn’t even appear on the project. Instead, amid a tapestry of scabrous guitars, searing bass, and vibrant drums, Yachty sounds right at home on this psych-rock spectacle of an album. He rarely raps, but his singing often relies on the virtues of his rapping: those greased-vowel deliveries and unrushed cadences, the autotune-sheathed vibrato. “Pretty,” for instance, is decidedly  not  a rap song—but what is it, then? It’s indebted to trap as much as it is ’90s R&B and MGMT, its drugged-out drums and warm keys able to house an indeterminate amount of ideas.

Yachty didn’t need to abandon hip-hop to find himself as an artist, but his experimental impulses helped him craft his first great album. Perhaps this is his lone dalliance in psych rock—maybe a return to trap is imminent. Or, maybe, he’ll make another 180, or venture deeper into the dystopia of corporate sponsorships. Who’s to say? For now, it’s invigorating to see Yachty shake loose the baggage of his teenage virality and emerge more fully into his adult artistic identity. His guise as a boundary-pushing rockstar isn’t a new archetype, but it’s an archetype he’s infused with his glittery idiosyncrasies. And look what he’s done: he’s once again morphed into a star the world didn’t see coming.

Review: Lil Yachty: ‘Let’s Start Here.’

Let me set the scene. It’s an early Friday morning and I am running low on sleep. On my walk to school, I remember that Lil Yachty , SoundCloud legend and an old favorite of mine, has just dropped a new album. I had been looking forward to it and heard whispers about rock influences. After getting past the horrifying, AI-created album cover, I experienced a truly incredible album. BOOM—psychedelic-rock influence. BOOM—next-level production. BOOM— Teezo Touchdown ,  Fousheé , Diana Gordon , Justine Sky , and Daniel Ceasar features (all complementing Yachty with fantastic vocals). Let’s Start Here. shocked me in a good way ( and woke me up on a slow morning). It opened my eyes and got me excited about the future of hip-hop. Yachty brings it all on his new album: crazy transitions, a great tracklist, and conceptual depth. 

It’s funny hearing his auto-tuned vocals in psychedelic rock, but Yachty finds a way to push the boundaries of genre and create a cool and cohesive sound. We had heard tastes of it before, like on Tame Impala’s Currents b-side remix of “Breathe Deeper,” but I was far more impressed by his sound here. Yachty obviously sought to be more than his SoundCloud/mumble rap image from the past and cement himself as a true, impactful artist, capable of changing modern music. I believe he executed it perfectly.

The first song, “the BLACK seminole.” throws you right into Yachty’s new sound. Produced by Justin Raisen (who is known for his work with experimentalists Yves Tumor and Joji ), the nearly seven-minute song introduces Yachty’s new sound with synth swells and laid-back rock instrumentals. When his vocals hit, it feels as if you were sent back 50 years to a Pink Floyd show. With its length, this song gives listeners a perfect opportunity to understand Yachty’s vision, allowing them to better process the rest of the album.

It’s followed by “the ride-,” assisted by the talented Teezo Touchdown. This track is where I thought Lil Yachty’s autotune-flushed vocals shined the most. Paired with the song’s ambiance and electronic melody, it feels as if this was the true purpose of his vocals.

After the groovy “running out of time”, we reach “pRETTY.” It has some silly lines from Yachty, like “let’s go to sunset-city, go to sun-city,” and albeit a fantastic feature from Fousheé, this song is the start of a short lull in the album. In that mix is the interlude “:(failure(:”, which is cool with its instrumental assistance from Mac Demarco and Alex G , but I feel like it does not add much to the album as a whole, as Yachty delivers a spoken word from his perspective on failure.

We saw that same energy from early in the album return with “WE SAW THE SUN!” The vibrato vocals seen in his hit song, “Poland,” return on one of the best-produced tracks this album has to offer. A couple of songs later comes the stand-out track, “IVE OFFICIALLY LOST THE VISION!!!!” With a comical elevator-music-esque intro, the song hits the listener with harsh noises and screams, before coming in with hard-hitting drums and one of the most energetic and raw sounds on Let’s Start Here. Diana Gordan’s vocals flow perfectly into Yachty screaming the track title in a beautifully climactic moment towards the end of the song. While it may not have much lyrical depth, the overall delivery creates a strong, emotional feeling that I never knew Yachty was capable of. You can absolutely say I was impressed.

The final leg of the album is where it shines brightest. “sHould i B?” sounds like it could be a bonus track from an upcoming Tame Impala album, but its coolest moments come with its ending. The droning guitars meet the theatrics at the beginning of “The Alchemist.,” creating a cinematic transition between two of the better songs on the album.

“REACH THE SUNSHINE.” ends Let’s Start Here. with a bang. Yachty’s and his team’s attention to detail is shown in the progression of this song. The acoustic first minute builds up to an intense, synth-layered melody that puts an exclamation point at the end of the album. To top it off, Daniel Ceasar joins Yachty with haunting harmonies that accent the song perfectly. The somber, piano-lead outro wraps this moody album up smoothly.

To compliment any part of this album without highlighting its collaborators would just be unfair. Yachty obviously did his research. Aside from Raisen, he recruited the likes of Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly , Unknown Mortal Orchestra ’s bassist Jacob Portrait , Magdalena Bay , MGMT’s Benjamin Goldwasser , and Nick Hakim . Whether they were a psych-rock veteran, or a modern producer, each of these artists contributed to Let’s Start Here.’s addictive sound and each should be celebrated.

Lil Yachty successfully created a psychedelic rock album, signaling one of the most interesting and entertaining sonic transitions I have ever seen from an artist. It deserves every ounce of hype it has received and Yachty has absolutely earned his flowers. I genuinely enjoyed it and am excited to see where Yachty takes his sound next.

Jacob Feinberg

Jacob Feinberg is a student at the University of Georgia, studying marketing and music business, with hopes to find a career in music journalism or artist management. After years of listening to and studying music, Jacob has decided to share his knowledge and opinion through Vinyl Mag. His favorite genre is rap/hip-hop, but you can catch him listening to basically any genre (r&b, jazz, rock, etc.). Jacob has a deep love for music and artistry, and he hopes to apply that by highlighting Athens's rich music scene and all its talented artists.

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