Lil Peep releases 'Crybaby' mixtape — emo rap coalesces
Lil Peep (Gustav Åhr), then 19, self-releases the Crybaby mixtape on June 10, 2016, via SoundCloud and his own digital channels. The tape, which fuses pop-punk and emo guitar samples with trap-derived drum patterns and Peep's deliberately fragile half-sung-half-rapped vocals, becomes the breakthrough emo-rap project of the late 2010s. Earlier emo-rap precursors (XXXTentacion's earliest SoundCloud work, Yung Lean's first releases, Bones) had established the aesthetic; Crybaby consolidates it into a single LP-length statement that internet-native teenage audiences could share whole.
Why it matters
Emo rap as a sub-genre had been building on SoundCloud for several years before Crybaby. Yung Lean had been doing it from Sweden since 2013. Bones had been doing it from Los Angeles since around the same time. XXXTentacion had been recording proto-emo-rap material under various aliases since 2013. What Crybaby did was put all of those threads (pop-punk guitar samples, fragile vocals, depression-and-substance lyrics, lo-fi bedroom-trap production) into one project that crossed past the SoundCloud insider scene into a broader internet-teenage audience. Lil Peep would die of an accidental fentanyl overdose seventeen months later. The sub-genre he had helped consolidate would scale across the next half-decade and continues to influence 2020s commercial rap structurally (the entire melodic-trap and pluggnb register descends from this template). You should hear Crybaby. It is the document of what was about to come.
Branches
Sub-genre1
Citations 2
- B
- B
Nearby in time
- 2016Phife Dawg (A Tribe Called Quest) dies
- 2016Skepta wins the Mercury Prize for 'Konnichiwa'
- 2016Coloring Book is released
- 2016Shawty Lo dies in an Atlanta car crash
- 2016Atrocity Exhibition is released
- 2016A Tribe Called Quest performs 'We the People' on SNL — first national performance after Phife's death