“This album is important because Gus is dead,” said Liza Womack, Lil Peep’s mom, when presenting his second album Come Over When You’re Sober Pt 2 to friends, colleagues and other supporters at a listening party in New York. “But it’s the album he’d have made if he were alive,” she added, in a nod to a larger conversation around the ethics of posthumous releases.
Rapper Lil Peep, born Gustav Åhr, was seen as a pioneer of emo rap with honest outpourings and samples of mid-2000s music. He died unexpectedly last November of an accidental fentanyl-xanax overdose, leaving behind work, both unfinished and completed, which his mother has been releasing. Come Over When You’re Sober Pt 2, the follow-up to his 2017 debut album Come Over When You’re Sober, was always intended to be heard. And with the hard work of his mom and Columbia Records, it’s finally going to see the light of day.
It’s hard to know how to pull off an event like this respectfully without forgetting the spirit of the person it commemorates. The party was small, with attendees and coverage tightly controlled. It was entirely dedicated to the memory of Peep; a mural outside showed his tattooed face alongside the album name and tracklist, and the small space, Ideal Glass Studios, was decorated in black and pink, his favourite colours. The album was presented by Peep’s mom, the president of Columbia Records US, Ron Perry, business partner Sarah Stennett, and the album’s producers George Astasio and Smokeasac. Their goal, with the album and the party, was to keep everything as close to Peep’s vision as possible.
The event felt like a memorial crossed with a Halloween party. Peep’s favourite holiday was Halloween, and there were tables adorned with black candles and pumpkin carvings of his face. Guests were presented with Gus’s favourite Halloween candy at the end. On the walls, videos of Peep and clippings from interviews were projected; headlines reminded attendees just how impactful his work was in such a short career, and footage of his face reminded us that he was also just a boy. The music playing while guests milled around was from a playlist of Gus’s favourite songs: Blink 182, Three Days Grace, Good Charlotte. Musicians he looked up to and who came to recognise his work, too.
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The album, while completed after Peep’s tragic death, was evidently put together with his best interests and wishes at heart. But the elephant in the room tonight is Falling Down, a song released posthumously in which Peep’s friend iLoveMakonnen spliced together Peep’s vocals with those of rapper XXXTentacion to form one track. The decision was highly controversial – when he died, aged 20, XXXTentacion was facing domestic abuse charges. GothBoiClique member Fish Narc slammed the decision; saying “[Peep] explicitly rejected XXX for his abuse of women, spent time and money getting XXX’s songs removed from his Spotify playlists, and wouldn’t have co-signed that song. Don’t listen to it.” The controversy surrounding X, including an incident in which he beat a gay man, meant that his values ran counter to those Peep lived by.
When discussing the ethical minefield Peep’s colleagues navigated to release the album, his mother appeared to allude to the X track. “Features are easy to manufacture,” she said, mentioning that Peep wouldn’t do features for no reason with people he didn’t like. “Don’t chop it up and put features on it unless it’s clear to you they wanted it,” she added, pointedly. Speakers stressed that they used Liza as a litmus test in handling the difficult issue of releasing work after an artist’s death. “And yes, I know what he would have wanted,” she added, reiterating that nobody knew Peep better than the woman he loved enough to get a neck tattoo reading “mom”.
The only delay to the album’s release was caused by Peep’s tragic death, and more so than with traditional artists, the prolific rapper had a huge amount of material to be dug through, which his mother did – with patience and respect. Peep’s work was always deeply personal; he sang candidly about drug use, suicide and other topics in a way that feels more poignant and devastating with him gone. Every speaker emphasised Peep’s wishes and intent. Jay Schumer, the VP of marketing at Columbia, said he wanted to make the album with “respect, integrity, and authenticity” and didn’t “want to mess any of this up”. Stennett made the difficult decision to take the album to Columbia, when she remembered Peep had a Sony tattoo on his leg.
The reason Peep was so popular – with famous artists, with ageing emos, and with teenagers – was because he was authentic. Not a single decision he made was made for clout or to be cool; he wore Hello Kitty beanies, painted his nails red, openly adored emo. He was honest and open with the world. I was lucky enough to interview him and he was one of the sweetest, funniest and most genuine people I’ve ever had the pleasure to speak to.
Among the audience were four teenage fans who had been let in from the cold New York night provided they gave up their phones. Peep was made by his fans; the people who brought him from the internet and into magazines in the space of a year. He loved them, respected them as equals, interacted with them. To allow them entry into something so private, the organisers were again honouring his memory. Opening the event, Schumer read out some of the thousands of comments on the video for Cry Alone, released the night before, showing the wide and powerful impact that Gus had. His fans loved him; they felt his loss, getting tattoos and setting up memorials all over the world.
Both the event and the long-delayed release are shrouded in darker topics. Liza took the opportunity to tackle opioid abuse in the music industry; “music artists suffer”, she said, discussing the scrutiny they are subjected to. The DEA has even blamed emo rap for opioids’ popularity, despite the fact that Peep, and other rappers who suffer with opioid abuse, are victims, not perpetrators.
Liza called the release of Come Over When You’re Sober Pt 2 “the model for how we handle posthumous releases of young artists who left no explicit instructions”. And maybe she’s right.
It doesn’t seem right to say that we should simply leave their back catalogues be; for an artist as prolific and ambitious as Peep, with a future as promising but so tragically cut short, it seems like an insult to his ambitious spirit to shut that work away. Voyeuristically we will always want to see more of an artist after they die; in unreleased photos, diary entries, unfinished songs. As Liza said, perhaps we can best honour the artists “by honouring their work”.