Album Review – Psykos

By Noah Temple

I didn’t want my first review to out me as a “drainer”, but I felt compelled to write about this album when I started listening to it. That’s on me, I guess.  

Psykos is a collaborative album by Swedish rappers Bladee and Yung Lean. It’s not their first album together, but I find the sound to be wildly different than other collaborations—the production is different with a lot more strumming and guitar than you’d normally hear in an album from any other Drain Gang member, although they still maintain their trademark vocals which are always nice to hear. The ordering and progression of Psykos is done fairly well with a cohesive story that you can pick up on during the first listen.  

Relative to other Drain Gang albums this is probably the most accessible. It’s not hard to dive into headfirst like some other Bladee albums and it does a good job at priming you for their other work. If, for whatever reason you’ve been trying to get into Bladee this is a good start point- think MM FOOD. 

It’s consistent with other Bladee projects in that it’s total run time is only 22 minutes for 8 songs, although the intro track is more spoken word, leaving the run time closer to a brief 20 minutes. The wonderful thing about an album this short is that I can pretty confidently admit that there are no skips and, honestly, it’s really good even without the sunk cost of listening to Drain Gang for 6 years.  

For a track review, “Ghosts”, “Still”, and “Things Happen” are probably my favorite. I really appreciate the soft strumming present throughout the album and I feel like these tracks encapsulate that the best.  

Overall, this is a really solid album to just listen to when doing anything. The vocals are easy to tune out for studying or you can listen if you’re just in the mood to listen to sad Swedish men. If you actively listening to Drain Gang then it might be a little underwhelming, but I found the entire listening experience enjoyable. As a standalone album I would rate it 8/10 and relative to other drain gang music it’s probably a 6.5–7/10.