Here, Peep and Tracy revel in their disarray. The core of any Gothboiclique song is a plea, for peace or corrosion or a way to hollow out. “I can’t fuck with you if we weren’t friends on MySpace,” Tracy slurs on “White Wine.” They ad-lib word associations, which veers into bland asides about fake friends and good girls, or a line that falls somewhere between serious and self-satire-“If I die today, you would try to fuck my bitch!” Tracy hisses on “Never Eat, Never Sleep.” You can hear them self-mythologizing, egging each other on they keep calling themselves vampires, crafting something mystical out of sleepless, strung-out nights. “Two weeks with the same old jeans on,” Tracy coos on “Dying Out West,” “I know you want to die, baby, this is your theme song.”īut this is also the sound of friends having fun, riffing off each other’s ridiculousness. The intensity is the point, and they braid cartoon imagery-castle walls and demons, full moons and bloody teeth-into songs about coke and comedowns and ache. “Lord why, lord why do I gotta wake up,” Peep moans in “White Wine,” as Tracy howls harmonies over a sputtering beat. Their voices echo and layer on “Your Favorite Dress,” trading verses while dark synths pool under them. “I know that’s your favorite dress,” they drone, “Set fire to it.” The best songs here find a cinematic shimmer. Peep and Tracy sang about rot and mess and entropy, destroying everything around you to mirror the chaos in your head. It’s scratchy and sludgy and woozy it sounds like it’s seeping into you. These are bleary tracks, with a ragged mesh of rock and rap and blaring, ticking drums. Newly released on streaming for the first time, these songs capture the instinctive way their voices blend and break over each other. castles and CASTLES II, the pair of mixtapes Peep and Tracy put out on SoundCloud five years ago, are time capsules for their collaboration. The posthumous Peep projects that have trickled out since then have been gifts to fans, shrapnels of his legacy. The two collaborated for a too-brief period, culminating in a bitter, public fall-out over Peep’s management and the way the media-and sometimes Peep himself-erased Tracy from the narrative around Gothboiclique and the rise of so-called “emo-rap.” They were barely speaking in 2017 when Peep died on a tour bus in Tucson, Arizona. Tracy said later he had never connected like that with anyone. Peep told Tracy he had a verse open for him, and the song they recorded that day is a frenetic collision, excavating a tender beat from a Postal Service song and frothing over it with half-sung raps about switchblades and taking a girl home to “connect like WiFi.” It’s close to perfect. He would be grateful to his friends for taking the time and care to do it just right.Five minutes after Lil Peep and Lil Tracy met, they hatched plans to make music together. Gus would be so proud to know that this album had come out. I am very grateful to Makonnen not only for his patience, grace, and fortitude, but also for the tenderness with which he re-assembled the original “Diamonds Team” to gently prepare the album for its release. I knew I had to do everything I could to help get this album released-and released the way Gus and Makonnen had made it. We all waited with anticipation for the release of this album. He knew there was more music to make, and he knew he had limited time due to his upcoming fall COWYS tour, so he organized his next chunk of studio time so he could meet Makonnen in London, where they made the last batch of songs. While Gus was glad to be home for his grandpa’s birthday, he could not wait to get back to making music with Makonnen. When he came home in August, he played those songs for us-over and over. Gus was absolutely thrilled about working with Makonnen. Lil Peep and Makonnen completed the first fifteen of what would be twenty-one songs and would later be known as the album “Diamonds” in Los Angeles, exactly 6 years ago in August of 2017.
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