Hi everyone. Freshthony Scrubtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this Yung Lean album, Jonatan.

Here we have a new album from singer, songwriter, rapper, producer, cloud rap pioneer, Mr. Yung Lean, Sweden's own, The Original Sadboy. He is back with his first full-length album in five years, though not really. Yes, while it has been a while since his last official full-length Starz in 2020, he has been far from inactive, not just recently working with some pretty massive names on some of their latest songs and projects, be it Charlie XCX, Travis Scott, Skrillex. But he's also been feeding fans since stars with multiple musical sidequests.

He had that rock-centric Dod Mark project drop in 2023. And that same year, we had that leandoer96 record, Sugar World, a crossover he did with Danish composer and producer, Friedrich Valentin, which I think is a super important project to draw attention to here.

Now, this is not the only record that Lean has dropped under the leandoer96 name. In fact, there have been multiple records and singles, and often in comparison with his usual body of work, the music under the leandoer name skews a lot more raw, lofi, even pop or singer-songwriter-centric. It really depends. And Sugar World is an especially odd addition to the leandoer 96 canon, considering almost the entire record is presented as if Lean is engaged in this super elaborate, drunken, theatrical karaoke performance over sometimes dreamy, sometimes hokey, sometimes glamorous instrumentals.

And while it's not great, on some level, it didn't really need to be because it seemed like it wasn't going for that necessarily. How sloppy and offkilter and awkward a lot of the performances on this record are seemed totally intentional, almost like Lean was engaged in a bit of a bit here.

Jonatan, by comparison, however, feels like that moment when someone who you've been watching engage in a shtick in a somewhat ironic way reveals that the act they've been engaged in has actually been unironically what they would rather be doing all along. In that sense, Jonatan does feel almost like a sequel or a spiritual successor to Sugar World, almost like that record was a testing ground for what we are getting here. You can hear it in the upped production quality and Lean mostly drifting away from a lot of the rap influences that originally broke him on the internet.

A lot of moodier instrumentals on this record, too. The styles and influences going into this record lean a lot more into indie pop and art rock, which, again, I think in concept is fine, not necessarily a bad thing to switch up styles. But I don't think Lean brings the vocal chops or lyrical finesse that one might need in order to pull off a sound like this fully and completely. Because even with this album being more serious than Sugar World in tone and in presentation, the many vocal performances on this album feel like, once again, I am sitting through bad karaoke.

And somehow it's even weirder to experience because I feel like I'm the only one in the audience with this record, specifically on tracks like "Might Not Be", as well as the weirdly upbeat "Forever Young", both of which contribute to a very rough first leg of this album.

However, I wouldn't say the tracklist on this thing is all bad. Lean's voice, in a way, does lend itself to the despondent slacker rock vibes of "Horses", as well as "Babyface Maniacs". But while I do think his singing fits these sounds a lot better, there's nothing really about these tracks that would make me go out of my way to listen to them over the numerous old-school rock classics in the style I could be previewing instead.

Things, in my opinion, don't really pick up in the second half of the album either. The song "Changes", for example, feels like if you took an indie pop and indie-tronic classic such as The Knife's "Heartbeats" and hollowed it out for basically no reason whatsoever. I mean, for sure there is something to tracks like "Teenage Symphonies for God" as well as "Terminator Symphony", but I feel like that's mostly due to the fact that Lean goes back into rap mode on these tracks, which is a delivery style that I think he sounds much more comfortable and confident in, one through which I think he is better at just conveying his emotions and his pain and his struggles. While, conversely, on every other moment on the album, it sounds like he's really struggling to keep it together.

While on one level, I can certainly respect what Lean is trying to accomplish on this album – and some of his tracks in recent years certainly dabbled in more of an art pop style before with a pretty dreamy instrumentation such as on 2017's "Stranger" – but in this particular case, him attempt to really broaden out his sound, I think for the most part, has led to a lot of tracks that just blow up in his face, which is why I'm feeling a strong 2 to a light 3 on this one.

Anthony Fantano, Yung Lean, Forever.