Song You Need: Yeat saves nu-metal on “Can’t stop it”

12.09.2022 - 10:35 / thefader.com

The FADER’s “Songs You Need” are the tracks we can’t stop playing. Check back every day for new music and follow along on our Spotify playlist. Modern rappers like to call themselves "rock stars," but the main inspirations that the most popular artists take from that iconography are the fashion and the mosh pits at their shows.

Heavy metal band t-shirts, spiked hair, and a packed venue dripping in testosterone are the references more so than the contents of the albums themselves. These artists, decked out in rock star flair while adhering mostly to the rap sounds of the day, tend to overwhelm the more sonically adventurous acts like City Morgue, Ho99o9, and Denzel Curry who have a genuine appreciation for loud guitars and devilish angst. Read Next: The 14 projects you should stream right now Yeat is another artist building on the image of rock stars as he evolves past the SoundCloud subgenre of rage rap.

"Talk," the lead single from his new EP LYFE, is built for inciting riots at the start of Yeat concerts, blazing with five-alarm synths and even subtle police chatter on the hook. As addictive as I find Yeat's music, I would not have immediately clocked him for a rapper who could make a truly impressive nu-metal song. And yet, that's just what Yeat's delivered on "Can't stop it." Like "Talk," it's also produced by BNYX, the newest member of the producer collective Working On Dying, but the mood is completely different.