Le1f, if you don’t know about him, is a young, snarly, bursting-with-personality rapper from New York. After releasing three always-fascinating, frequently-wonderful mixtapes, Hey is his first record that costs actual money, and he’s releasing it on Terrible Records, the label co-founded by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor. That’s an odd fit for any rapper, but it’s hard to imagine a place where Le1f would fit in neatly. And Terrible has, at the very least, proven to be a welcoming place for stylish synthesists who use pop music as a playground: Solange, Twin Shadow, Kindness, Blood Orange, Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek. Le1f is gay, and that shouldn’t matter, but it does. For those of us who have been paying attention for long enough, the idea of a powerful gay rap voice seemed like a faraway dream at first, but now there’s this whole range of tough, flamboyant queer snarlers on the genre’s margins. (They shouldn’t have to be on the margins, but anyway it’s a start.) And Le1f, though he’s a great rapper, isn’t a great rapper who happens to be gay; he’s got a jagged dance-music influence and a glammy playfulness that ties him, at least in the abstract, to New York’s vogue-ball scene. But he’s also leery of being held up as some paragon of an imagined queer-rap scene, and he gets some of his best lines from that tension. A few second into Hey, he offers this: “Ask a gay question? Here’s a black answer.” How badass is that?
A1 Hey 3:22
A2 Sup 3:32
B1 Boom 3:26
B2 Wut 2:47
B3 Buzz 3:29
