Written by John Kuehne
Crossing between hip-hop and pop, solo outfit Yeek blends conventions of trap and backs many of his tracks with basslines you’d expect to hear on a Toro y Moi track.
Valencia is loose. Of the three episodes of Euphoria my girlfriend made me watch, the kind of instrumentation found here squeezes right into that mold. Something trying to cling to an edgier future but holding on conventions that feel comfortable. You can hear it in the track “M.H.”, a tight little pop tune with some great bedroom backbeat and a whimsical melody to tie it together. The same can be said for the track “Overthinking”, this has all the elements of a bedroom indie hit: A punchy baseline, repetitive lyrics about some sort of insecurity (in this case, overthinking), and a kind of soft groove you can help but nod your head to. Furthermore, Yeek continues his pop excellence on “3000 miles (Baby Baby)”. Yeek channel Frank Ocean with and sings to a lover he’d travel 3000 miles for. Even deeper down the album, Yeek uses minimal space to make a track feel larger than it is with “Watch Me”. The inclusion of the guitar riff on the back half of the track is just *chefs kiss*. While this start to the album begins easily and pretty unoffensive, I can’t help but remind myself that Yeek is neither Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi nor Frank Ocean himself. And with track lengths never surpassing about 2 and a half minutes, Yeek leaves me wanting him to explore more of these sounds. The tracks use a catchy synth or bass as the backbone and he rides it on a sweet melody, and that’s about it. But in a music world premised on quick and easy hooks searching for what the TikTok kids can cling onto, I don’t blame him.
When the synths and basslines aren’t being used, Yeek steps into more of a hip hop/trap artist where he can at times feel a little uncomfortable. “Back N Forth” shines a light on this change in form. A gear shift to say the least, Yeek seems to lose the focus and throw away what
made the first album of this album so enjoyable; groovy bedroom indie pop. Yeek furthers my confusion on the track “ETA”. Kicking it off with a what sounds like the light strum of a Stratocaster with some special backing vocals, it turns into another trap song that can be cast aside. The feature by Dotha doesn’t add too much.
Yeek ends his concise 23-minute album with “Dirty Pillow”, another unfocused cross between your conventional pop sounds and your typical hip hop 808s and high hats. In the end here, Yeek is close to making a really great record. It has a lot of peaks and valleys but the valleys are little to low for me to keep in a consistent rotation, but for fans of that late-night woozy hip hop and that can make you dance and cry at the same time, this is a home-run.
6.6/10
Fav tracks: “M.H.” “Watch Me” “3000 miles (Baby Baby)
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