Into The Music
Today, Bladee dropped two new songs with almost no announcement: “Love Is a State” and “Eyelash,” both produced by Drain Gang affiliates Yung Sherman and Woesum. A few hundred words of social media post, two tracks, done. This is exactly how Bladee operates, and it is a large part of why he has the following he has.
Born Benjamin Reichwald in Stockholm in 1994, Bladee has been releasing music since 2014 under the Drain Gang umbrella, a collective that also includes Ecco2k, Thaiboy Digital, Yung Lean, and the producers Whitearmor and Yung Sherman. Drain Gang emerged from the same early 2010s Tumblr and SoundCloud ecosystem that produced a lot of music that did not survive past 2016. What made Bladee different was that he kept developing in genuinely interesting directions.
His early work, stuff like Eversince and Gluee, was lo-fi and melancholy and very online in a way that was specific to that moment. But with 2017’s Red Light and then Icedancer in 2018, something shifted. The music got weirder and more ambitious, the production leaned into glassy, almost ambient textures, and the lyrics became harder to pin down in ways that felt intentional rather than evasive. He was doing something with the aesthetics of sadness and detachment that was more than just mood.
Cold Visions in 2024 was widely considered his most complete record, a dense and atmospheric collection that earned him coverage from Pitchfork and other outlets that had previously treated his work as a curiosity. Last year, the EP Ste the Beautiful Martyr 1st Attempt continued in that direction, and a collaboration with Yung Lean, “Inferno,” showed the productive creative tension that has always existed within the Drain Gang ecosystem.
The two new songs are more of what makes him compelling: production that floats in an undefined space between hip-hop and ambient electronic, vocals delivered in his characteristic half-whisper, lyrics that arrive at emotional clarity through oblique angles. “Love Is a State” in particular sounds like a thesis statement. He is not describing love; he is positing it as something more structural than that.
Cloud rap is a label that has been applied to Bladee and his contemporaries so often that it has become almost meaningless. What the music actually is, is a form of pop that refuses the genre’s traditional relationship with hooks and immediacy, that uses atmosphere and texture as primary tools rather than melodic certainty. Whether or not that sounds appealing to you probably tells you everything you need to know about whether Bladee is for you. For the substantial audience that has found him, the answer is obvious.