"$$$$" single cover artwork
More about Yeek and Future Reference:
One day, long from now, when Yeek is old and retired from the music industry, he will have a time capsule to remember the peak of his powers. His worth won’t be measured by streaming numbers and playlists, impressions made and audiences reached. Rather, Yeek’s work will be analyzed by the number of people he impacted on an individual level, the fans he encouraged to let loose, forget their worries, and enjoy his particularly effervescent brand of left-leaning pop music. To remember those days, Yeek will press play on Future Reference, his sterling new album that chronicles his life as a songwriter, Angeleno, lover, and friend. It nods to his past work while gleaming ecstatically towards the future, coalescing signifiers from Yeeks of yore and Yeeks to come. He creates an album that says so much while still being dictated by a singular, remarkably simple force: Will this make people feel good?
To that question, which Yeek asked himself while writing and recording Future Reference, the answer is a resounding yes. This isn’t hedonism on vulgar display, but a musical vocabulary being attuned to the things that make us feel good, worthwhile, heard, and understood. “ETA2,” one of many self-referential tunes on Future Reference (“ETA” was released in 2021) features Paris Texas and is made for warm nights cruising towards nowhere in particular with the top down. The lo-fi pop banger finds the duo of Paris Texas moving closer to Yeek’s sound, while the songwriter and producer from Jersey City moves his pop leanings closer towards the hip-hop and punk spheres that Paris Texas so comfortably blur.
Like so much of Future Reference, the Paris Texas collab came about organically, the product of visionaries getting to know each other as friends first and musicians second. It’s this sort of vibe that Yeek conjures throughout the album. Pull up, roll a joint, have a beer, don’t worry about Venmo; just grab the next round. With so much time to reflect and contemplate on what this album would be during the pandemic, Yeek wanted to cultivate the low-stakes appeal of drifting aimlessly while still having the album pack a confident punch. His ability to weave through these two lanes is what makes Future Reference simultaneously so captivating and such an easy listen.
The stakes though, come from Yeek’s decision to incorporate all facets of himself into this work. “I'm taking bits of the future, bits of the past, bits of me now and putting it into one album,” he explains. “Whoever I become, whoever I was, and whoever I am now, it's all part of me.”
This record is a moment in time, but Yeek hopes it spans generations, languages, lifetimes, and galaxies. The players he recruited to join him on this album are singular voices in their own rights, and perfectly attuned to help Yeek achieve his vision. They’re less collaborators than extended parts of Yeek’s family, musicians like Raveena, Bakar, Erik Bodin of Little Dragon, and Jordan Ware, all of whom play huge roles on Future Reference.
This is music for both intimate moments and communal grace. “$$$$” blends the warm melt of Rhodes keys with bouncy synths and trap drums, creating a limitless world that Yeek explores with joy and vibrancy. When the amen break gets cued up alongside classic trance synths, the result is both familiar and deeply original to this work. And perhaps there’s no better way to describe Yeek. He taps into something both primal, born in all of us, and yet, unlike anything else in music.
“$$$$” is an ode to Yeek’s past, with Jersey Club influences paying homage to his Garden State roots. “I was originally born in Jersey and spent all my childhood there until I was a teenager. I wanted a song to reflect my biggest musical inspirations, the stuff I grew up listening to,” he explains. As such, “$$$$” is a beautiful amalgamation of pop and rap styles. Somewhere between 112’s sultry R&B vocals and Timbaland’s iconic, rumbling beats lands Yeek, neighbors of both styles but in a different zip code altogether.
Future Reference is Yeek at his most confident, fully formed in his sound and eager to stretch it in all sorts of unexpected directions. There is no safety here, but nevertheless Yeek provides comfort and a haven. Follow me, he says, and follow we do. “I just wanted this record to sound free and unshackled from anything,” he explains.
Balancing this philosophy with a desire to reference his own work and chart his future course makes for a fascinating dichotomy. Throughout, Yeek teeters towards the edge, staring into the abyss and filing his notes away for a later expedition. “I want this record to sound like freedom,” Yeek says. Amongst the delightfully sticky hooks, deft mingling of genres, and relentless willingness to experiment, Yeek screams from the mountaintop, unbothered whether his voice is too loud or falling on deaf ears. The joy is in the work itself, sure, but Future Reference is poised to echo and reverberate through Yeek’s past and future, forever. And ours, too.
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