Finding transcendence in sobering sincerity with Yung Lean’s ‘Jonatan’ [director's cut]
Originally published in the Daily Californian on May 12 (theatrical release). This is the uncensored, extended version (directors' cut).
It’s late spring and you’ve come home to your rustic abode in the countryside after a long journey. It’s 4 P.M. and the sunbeams stream in through the dusty windows. The birds are chirping, the landscape abloom. An uncanny melancholia creeps up on you. Have you finally found God? You haven’t been back in years, but the scene is just as serene as you imagined, just as comforting as you remember. Everything has led to this present moment of return. The party is officially over, but it was nice while it lasted. Now at home, you are just you — all the versions of you — the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s all you.
This is how it feels listening to Jonatan, 28-year-old Swedish rapper Yung Lean, real name Jonatan Leandoer Håstad’s newest LP, released on May 2. As a long-time follower of Yung Lean and his chaotic trajectory as an artist, this meditative sentiment of coming home after a period of profound turbulence and adventure is deeply sobering.
It’s the year of the snake in 2025 and we’re shedding our skin, stripping down to the pure, raw core to unearth something new — a rebirth. This is precisely what Yung Lean does in Jonatan as he traverses beyond his emo cloud rap roots into something genreless, borrowing from the likes of ambient, alternative, lo-fi and indie pop. Three years in the making, it’s the longest he’s ever spent on a single record. The album consists of 13 tracks with no features, and he swaps out his usual go-to ensemble of Whitearmor, Gud, Yung Sherman and the rest of Drain Gang for producer and Frank Ocean collaborator Rami Dawood’s acoustic, orchestral instrumentation and angelic choirs. No more intricate 808s or the fuck-bitches-get-money lyrical ethos that permeated his earlier works. Or in his words to GQ, “A bit like, uncle album. Old man type shit.”
The album’s melancholic, poetic lyricism shines most notably in the tracks “I’m Your Dirt, I’m Your Love” and “Paranoid Paparazzi.” Paired with minimalist acoustic guitar riffs and downtempo orchestral production, Jonatan feels like a creative merging between Håstad’s two artist personas, Yung Lean and Jonatan Leandoer96, the latter being his lesser-known, more personal, indie alter ego. Until now, it stood in contrast to his mainstream, hip-hop-oriented moniker as Yung Lean. In choosing to bear his real name as the album title, Yung Lean brings the emotionally intimate, lo-fi sound of Jonatan Leandoer96 to a wider audience. With Jonatan, he sheds his old live-fast-die-young (yung) character of Yung Lean to reveal Jonatan, the true self beneath the chaos.
The standout tracks on this LP are the aforementioned “I’m Your Dirt, I’m Your Love,” “Paranoid Parazzi,” as well as the first pre-release single “Forever Yung.” “I’m Your Dirt, I’m Your Love” embodies the album’s overarching idea of melancholic homecoming with its opening verse:
Heaven looks through you
This the life I choose
I've been gone since June
There's nothing we can't do
Don't tell me it's too soon
Another night in ruins
Sunbeams fill the room
So let's change the view
Accompanied by a steady, simple guitar bassline and strings, the verse builds up to the chorus, bearing the song’s bittersweet name: “I'm your dirt, I'm your love / You're my last and my first one.” Yung Lean’s vocal delivery is his signature coarse, husky timbre that’s most often seen in his work as Jonatan Leandoer96. Yet in this song, it’s also sweet, with a profound sentiment of hope and warmth that fills his voice and Dawood’s production.
“Paranoid Paparazzi,” while also in a major key, takes on a slower tempo and a more haunting atmosphere drenched in nostalgia. The track opens with a bare, lo-fi chord progression that’s reminiscent of an old record player. The slow, minimalist drum beat doesn’t come in until nearly 40 seconds into the song. In the meantime, we meditate on just the dusty turntable-esque chords paired with Yung Lean’s restrained, spoken word poetry rap style:
Like a red desert, you ride on all day
You made me up to be out of papier-mâché
Gave me plastic hands and eyes of glass
Clock has a heart with vulgar romance
Down Desire Avenue, you pushed me bright
Fed me with pills and lullabies every night
Dissolved in front of your enchanting thighs
The lyrics are syntactically beautiful, uncanny, pensive and some of the strongest writing of the entire project. The description evokes a wistfulness for a bygone era, like a reminiscing of the fast-paced thrills one lived before returning home. All the good, bad and ugly, now a distant memory. As the track progresses and the stripped-back percussion kicks in, the turntable sound transforms into a flute-like vibrato, reverberating like a distant church bell to evoke an oneiric quality, a waking dream. This dreamlike quality is enhanced by a spoken word interlude in the middle of the track in Swedish. It's a faint, calming woman's voice, slightly distorted as though we are listening to an answering machine — a message from another life.
Finally, “Forever Yung” is soaked in sunlight and optimism and incorporates some of the most multi-layered production in the whole album. With lyrics like, “Girl, inside that mask of yours-yours / Just take it off and let it show” and “'Cause you see me up, and you see me down / Yeah, you see me rise out the ashes, and- / Like a phoenix, I will come up and rise,” the project’s themes of soul-searching and rebirth are proudly on display. The acoustic production has a folksy, fairytale-like atmosphere with sustained string chords superimposing a steady percussion bassline, with woodwinds flowing above like distant smoke from an old-fashioned pipe. The song’s whimsical, fantastical quality is also expressed visually in the surreal yet celebratory tone of the music video. The set is that of a desaturated countryside, yet full of idiosyncratic costumes and laughter. The whole thing feels like a children’s story you once outgrew, only to return to it as an adult and recognize that the seemingly simplistic message of friendship, hope and love was right all along. Or in terms of the album’s all-encompassing themes, it’s like leaving home in search of excitement and adventure in your youth, only to realize many years later that home is truly where the heart is.
If Jonatan embodies the stripped-back vulnerability and maturity in the current era of Yung Lean, then its diametrically opposed predecessor is his 2016 rage-filled, classic cloud rap sophomore album Warlord, the project that first converted me to a fan. Recorded in only six months at just age 19 while on a near-fatal drug-fueled bender in opulent Miami, Warlord is peak Yung Lean-branded, hedonistic hip hop excess: drugs, bitches, designer clothes and psychic turmoil. It’s drenched in that careless, self-destructive ethos of youthful swagger. Juxtapose this with the sonic slowburn of Jonatan, released nearly a decade later after spending multiple years developing mostly at home in suburban Stockholm, living the slow life amongst the retired folks. Gone are the days of coke-snorting, Xanax-popping iterations of the Yung Lean persona. He’s traded that for sobriety, trips to the local cafe, boxing and making whimsical ceramic sculptures. One might even say he’s entering his unc era.
We’re witnessing the newest epoch of Yung Lean’s metamorphosis — a slow, floral cultivation towards authenticity, and a new beginning with infinite space for further mastery. The peak has yet to be reached. From his DIY cloud rap origins to the diverse, genre fusion of Jonatan, there’s a throughline of rawness and a desire to evolve. Jonatan is Yung Lean’s homecoming journey, a sincere reflection of his spiritual passage to self-transcendence and ultimately, an ode to worldliness and the artist life. He demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, true creative awakening comes not from lingering in darkness, but from one’s willingness to grow and find the light. Because when the sun sets at the end of the day, you are just you — wherever you are — all the darkness and light, nothing and everything. God is by your side, all of you, the multifaceted, ever-evolving you.
I rate this album 4.0/5.0