Lil Yachty’s “Let’s Start Here” took flight on all streaming services on Jan. 27 and hasn’t come down. Since its release, the ambient, alternative psych rock album has contested the limits of vocal performance and complicated Miles McCollum’s persona as a musician.
Last October, McCollum’s single, “Poland” previewed the audibly avian-inspired tropes on “Let’s Start Here,” to a knocking kick and rage-beat chord progression. Everybody loved it — it’ll stand as one of the coolest marriages of music and social media ever.
But, in his latest release, McCollum traded the F1LTHY beat for a pensive closed hat and dusty snare to a different reception. As a bid for a new career trajectory, McCollum’s “Let’s Start Here” is successful for a number of reasons but it’ll never soar as high as “Poland.”
McCollum’s voice stirs the album’s audible hues in the same way that a stick stirs a paint jar. Similar to “Poland,” his performances beside Teezo Touchdown, Diana Gordon and Fousheé prioritize the audible experience more than the lyrical one. The fine line between the two is drawn by alternative rock lyrics that offer nothing deeper than fleeting images of love.
That said, the perfectly tucked, fringed vocals in tracks like “pRETTy” and “sAy sOMETHINg” sound generative with the MGMT-inspired instrumental. If McCollum wanted to make a high-charting album with ten tracks identical to “Poland,” he would’ve. But, “Let’s Start Here” has a different set of goals.
Fans of McCollum’s “Coffin” and “G.I. Joe” don’t hear the upside to this change until the second-half of the album, when McCollum reworks psych-rock to his liking. Across the 14 tracks, there are three tempos that add rounded texture to the album: slow (“the BLACK seminole”), medium (“running out of time”), and blazen (“The Alchemist”). Each tempo carries a set of successes and failures but they collectively map McCollum in the alternative psych rock world of Beach House’s “Myth” and Yves Tumor’s “Kerosene” featuring Diana Gordon.
Used mostly for interludes and pacing, there’s not much to be said about the album’s slow-tempo tracks like “:(failure(:” and “REACH THE SUNSHINE.” other than the fact that they’re too long. The album’s medium-tempo tracks will likely land McCollum on the radio and represent the album as a whole — these are for the fans of Tame Impala that enjoy the crashing-cymbal beat drops heard in “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards.”
The album’s blazen tempo carries most, if not all of the album’s coolest moments. Contextually, the album’s underlying ambience comes from the fiery, molten moments of surrealism in this blazen rush of percussion and roaring chords like the album’s prettiest supernova, “The Alchemist.” McCollum uses texture in “Let’s Start Here” to create a world in which an ecstatic rush of emotions, including love and indifference, is comfortably numbing.
The psychedelic quality of the album runs deep, starting with the ‘70s Funkadelic bassline in “running out of time.” In “Let’s Start Here,” each tempo displays a dynamic relationship with the ego-slaying sun. For McCollum, this formlessness and homogeneity breed a macro-benefit for the album’s replay value while sacrificing nuanced micro-acclaim. There’s about a 30-second gap attached to a few tracks where the lasting notes stretch into the next idea. Additionally, one of the beloved tropes of the 2010s, the whirring drone, creates a continuous, complete flow of sound that McCollum bends but rarely breaks.
Together, McCollum uses the transitions and pedal drones across the album to create an hour-long kaleidoscope of sound to lose oneself within. In the relevant transition between “drive ME crazy!” and “IVE OFFICIALLY LOST ViSiON!!!!,” a layer of wandering noise features McCollum screaming in agony, like someone who stared at the sun for too long and merged with the star. It’s intense.
With such a genre pivot from McCollum’s previous work, some could criticize “Let’s Start Here” for leaning too much on collaborators to produce these effects. McCollum sparsely raps on the album but by no means does that mean “Let’s Start Here” is a rap project. At most, McCollum can be credited with the album’s creative direction and lead vocals. But most of the names on the album’s tracklist have little to do with anything McCollum’s touched before. While exploring new genres, Yachty’s credit list is the greatest strength of the album but simultaneously its Achilles heel.
On one hand, it’s a fresh quirk that the album is entirely co-written and produced by Patrick Wimberly of the Y2K synth-pop duo Chairlift with Caroline Polachek, beyond McCollum’s influence. However, this credit alone could disqualify “Let’s Start Here” from any conversations of McCollum personally pushing a specific agenda. For every sonic moment of familiarity in the album, there’s a justifying credit tied to who you’re thinking of — Yves Tumor, Alex G, Mac Demarco and Blood Orange are just a few. In this regard, the album may have benefitted from being released as a collaboration-album instead of a singular Lil Yachty project. He’s a star, but he’s not big enough to exclude the others around him.
Poetically, “Let’s Start Here” is McCollum’s metamorphosis into an evolved artistic persona. He succeeded in showing a new capacity for himself at the cost of his legitimate credit as the sole force behind the album, only time will tell how much credit McCollum deserves for its innovation. One trip at a time — we’ll see him on the other side.
Mason Stoutamire is an Arts & Entertainment Editor for the 2022-23 year. He can be reached at mstoutam@uci.edu.