In the spring, a skinny, pink-haired, heavily tattooed 20-year-old called Lil Peep embarked on his debut tour. With no label, no PR and no hits to his name, he sold out every show, some to screaming crowds of several thousand. Stranger still, his biggest gigs weren’t in his current home town, Los Angeles, but in Russia, where he’d never set foot before.
“It turned out I’m like Justin Bieber over there,” says the singer/rapper/emo kid, born Gustav Ahr. “I couldn’t walk down the street without being mobbed. If I wanted a burger, we had to drive. It was intense. Was I pleased? More shocked. At the gigs, I watched people singing my lyrics and wondered if they even knew what they meant.”
Hence, in his debut video, released in June, for the slo-mo track Benz Truck, some of the lyrics were shown translated into Russian. Since then, Lil Peep’s Russian fans have followed suit, making videos for other Peep songs with their own translations on screen.
This month, he releases his debut album, Come Over When You’re Sober. That it won’t chart or even make it to radio doesn’t matter. Still label-less by choice — “They all want me, but I’m going to wait,” he says — Lil Peep is one of a new generation of artists who measure their success less by sales and streams than by social-media stats.
The aim, in particular, is to be big on Instagram, the app on which fame and fortune are now most easily found. Like lots of his peers, Lil Peep began by posting his scratchy DIY songs on SoundCloud, the currently-under-threat platform for new artists that superseded MySpace. But it’s on Instagram, where image is paramount, that their popularity has exploded.
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Whether you like Lil Peep’s music or not — its lo-fi mix of rock, hip-hop and emo, paired with lyrics that reference his depression, drug use and failed relationships, is squarely aimed at the under-25s — you can’t argue that he looks the part. That he’s already in demand from the fashion world is no surprise. His first official photoshoot was with Mario Testino, since which he has modelled at Milan and Paris fashion weeks, and been bombarded with designers trying to sign him up.
“They all say the same — that I’m edgy,” the singer shrugs, between checking incessant alerts on his phone. “That I make them look edgy. I’ve been offered dozens of brand opportunities, but I only accept the ones I like. It’s the same with music. I wouldn’t work with bigger artists outside my scene to gain popularity — I’d lose respect.”
On social media, being seen as real is the key. For millennial artists, attracting followers means putting their lives not just online, but into their music and their art. Lil Peep’s live set is a replica of his bedroom, complete with the posters he grew up with on his wall and the mattress he hauled around Skid Row squats for 18 months, on which he wrote and recorded his debut album.
He has deleted his breakthrough EP, last year’s Lil Peep Part One, from SoundCloud. “I don’t want to represent myself with songs about certain people or topics that are no longer relevant in my life. Also, my sound has evolved.”
How much the music matters is a moot point, but this new approach is changing how people discover and consume pop. Fans want to follow their favourite artists’ real lives in real time, wherever they are. “We’re the first generation of musicians who can start a scene all over the world at the same time,” Lil Peep says. “It’s crazy. I grew up in New York and saw a lot of bands who were successful there, but nowhere else. Now I live in LA, but my biggest fan bases are in Russia, Europe and the southwest States. I sold out in London, same in Paris, purely from Instagram.”
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The app isn’t breaking this new breed of artists, it’s creating them, as brands as much as musicians. That may be cynical, but it’s also smart. It’s likely that Lil Peep is making most of his money from his merchandise — his $60 cagoules and $66 hoodies are sold out on his website, and are on eBay with huge mark-ups. Even better are the T-shirts that bastardise Bart Simpson with Lil Peep’s pink hair and distinctive tattoos — though the singer claims they were created by a friend, so the copyright infringement isn’t his problem.
“Of course it’s as much about image as music,” he says. “But you could say the same about rock stars of the past. They were characters. David Bowie is my biggest inspiration. Pretty much the only thing that stayed the same with Bowie was his eyes. Everything else constantly changed, from his sexuality to his songs.”
Born in Pennsylvania, but brought up on Long Island, Lil Peep comes from a family of academics: his grandfather is a retired professor of Latin American history at Harvard and his parents, who split when he was in his early teens, are both Harvard graduates turned teachers. “I always got good grades, I just didn’t go to school much,” he recalls. “I didn’t like it. They let me do my diploma from home, but I always knew I was destined to do something creative, so I didn’t care.”
He started self-tattooing at 14, but admits that his face tattoos were a way to make him stand out online. “The competition is fierce,” he says. “You have to look better than everyone else.”
He spent a year in LA with only his cat for company, recording his songs solo using a $100 microphone plugged into his laptop before becoming part of a musical community centred on Instagram. Only now is he learning to play real instruments. “I can play shitty guitar and I’m OK on bass, but what I really want is to learn piano,” he says. “I am musical, always have been. My mum spotted that when I was little and made me take up trombone. It hasn’t been much help, though I suppose I could put out a trombone track. I’m pretty good. Believe it or not, I used to win state trombone competitions.”
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Lil Peep’s sound is often described as “new emo”, much to the anger of old emo fans, who troll him en masse online. Still, you know you’re onto something when you’re making people mad. “It wasn’t me who described it as emo, but I can see where it comes from. Honestly, I don’t know anyone who defines themselves by one genre any more. I’d say I’m a bit hip-hop, sub-rock and maybe emo because of the lyrics. But that could change tomorrow, depending on my mood.
“Personally, I like everything from Gucci Mane to My Chemical Romance. My musical idol is Frank Ocean, because he’s a mainstream artist changing the mainstream. Ditto Kurt Cobain. I’d love to be the new Kurt Cobain.”
That ambition has led to predictable abuse from online detractors, but watch the footage of Lil Peep’s gigs online, of thousands of teenagers passionately chanting his lyrics, or copying his look, or mobbing him on the streets of Moscow, and it’s clear that his music is connecting in the real world as well as on Instagram. Not that anyone who has purchased his merch would make that silly distinction.
Come Over When You’re Sober, Part One is out on Friday; you can listen to Lil Peep now on Apple Music or Spotify. He will be playing in London on Sept 26, at a venue yet to be confirmed
