JONATAN
Yung Lean
The Big Issue Australia
Issue #73723 May 2025
By Olivia J. Bennett
Cloud rap’s Swedish sadboi laureate Yung Lean returns with Jonatan, an album convinced of its own depth, even as it drifts from what once made him compelling. It opens with ‘Might Not B’, a Frankensteinian splice of lyrics—Bill Withers, ABBA, and a Gil Scott-Heron nod: “Might not be such a bad idea if I never…” By the end, you might wish he’d taken his own advice. On ‘Horses’—a flogged nod to The Rolling Stones—shoegaze guitars and syrupy strings reach for transcendence but land in vapour. “Wild horses / Keep pulling me away from you”, he mumbles. Throughout, his vocals are under-enunciated and affectless—conversational to the point of disinterest. There’s this pompous genius-at-work energy: a Charli XCX co-sign and a shared visual world that once felt sharp and surreal. But where BRAT burned with clarity and control, Jonatan drifts—listless, self-impressed, and hollow. The mood feels like a half-baked Casanova suffocating you with second-hand epiphanies. Ultimately, this record drags the culturally cringe, indie twee sensitivities of his jonatan leandoer96 projects into the Yung Lean mythos—killing off the persona that once made him vital.