LYFESTYLE

The enigma born Noah Olivier Smith—better known as Yeat, to use the word “known” loosely—broke through in 2021 as a maverick of rage-rap. These days, the 24-year-old exists in his own orbit entirely, recording and engineering his own songs that are possibly informed by extraterrestrial wisdom and rife with bizarro ad-lib soundscapes, dystopian-sounding beats, and non sequiturs that could either be profound or total nonsense. (And umlauts inserted where no one has ever dared to insert umlauts before, naturally.) The songs across his deep, curious catalog sound like World War 16 battle cries, or the moment a UFO beam makes contact with a cornfield, or the sound of an old world being replaced with a new one. Yeat’s known (again, loosely) for his strange preoccupations: sui generis slang terms, face-shielding headgear, bells and flutes. *LYFESTYLE*, his fifth studio album, shows off a handful of new obsessions: telling lies, gazing with wonderment at lights, threatening to cut people’s heads off like the Red Queen. It’s also a 22-track showcase for more probing stylistic experimentation, from “FOREVER AGAIN,” his version of a New Wave track, to “GONE 4 A MIN,” which channels a *Yeezus* deep cut thrown into zero gravity on which he makes a promise to “turn a deaf folk blind.” He’s big enough to feature on the most-streamed track from Drake’s *For All the Dogs*, but far-out enough to inspire more questions than answers.