A few months ago, on his March release ADL, California-born rapper-producer Yeat took a by now predictable leap toward more traditional pop sounds. While not as craven as a full-scale switch-up, it was clear the 26-year-old wanted a bigger audience and was willing to make himself a little more palatable to get there. His latest, the compact, seven-track EP Cocoon, appears on the surface to be a return to form, though its barely 17-minute run exposes how little he has left to do with the sounds he made his name on.
Cocoon’s brightest spot, the Drake-assisted (or, rather, Drake-led) “MISS MY DAWG,” is the most convincing Yeat has sounded since his SoundCloud days. The song initially premiered during Drake’s Fear of Missing Out film and marks the pair’s fourth collaboration. On the track, you can feel genuine emotional stakes, as both artists rap about loss and growth. You get the sense, in his grizzled, machine-gun-style delivery, that Yeat was hungry. The issue is that aside from a few flashes of inspiration in these tracks, we’re served what could charitably be described as slop: overwrought, repetitive rhyme schemes, like on the confounding “COCOON,” where the Migos mimicry only adds to the monotony.
It’s also impossible not to hear Yeat’s other sonic forefather, Travis Scott, across the EP. The elongated croon at the start of “EARNËD IT” might as well have been plucked from Astroworld. Indeed, there’s something detestable about the posturing in Yeat’s music contrasted with its obvious debt to more established and talented artists. In early September, after rumors swirled that Scott had made the call to have Yeat’s verse removed from “Eaters,” off Young Thug’s YSL compilation Slime Language 3, Yeat responded with the apparent Scott diss “ON NOTHING.” But his insistence here that he’s “pushin’ the limit” strains credulity when the whole EP sounds like feeding “Travis Scott” into an algorithm.
There is a sense of fan service to Cocoon, a return to the familiar product that Yeat’s medium-sized nation of monthly listeners have come to expect, but even on tracks where he makes overtures to the rising generation of rage-rap fans, like the Synthetic-co-produced “HOLY WATËR,” Yeat’s efforts fall flat. “I’m a lumberjack, yeah, I split the tab” has some of his old absurdity, but by the second verse, he’s reduced to repeating variations of “I don’t give a fuck ’bout shit,” as though saying it enough times might make it feel like a point of view.
Cocoon arrives with the promise of something like a metamorphosis or rebirth, an increasingly familiar proposition from Yeat. “I’m definitely trying to change it up, trying to give the youth some real music, some real art,” he told Zane Lowe ahead of ADL. As with that album and 2093 before it, it seems much of Yeat’s musical concern these days is sorting out where, exactly, his sound fits. His early releases had the benefit of novelty. Even as his sound was clearly indebted to the times, he managed to provide a recognizable distillation of early-2020s rage rap. Now, as tastes change, Yeat’s output sounds more like a scramble for identity.
