Several of Peep’s old GothBoiClique collaborators spoke out on social media about Peep’s wariness of XXXTentacion because of the severe allegations against him. For others it was a craven collision of agendas. For some, the discovery of the recording was kismet, a way to connect the music and power of two rising stars who died way before their time. When “Falling Down” was announced, in August, it quickly became a flash point and a distraction, and a source of dissent within the group of people responsible for shepherding Peep’s estate. Their worlds overlapped, but only somewhat. Though they were exploring similar musical pathways at the same time, Lil Peep and XXXTentacion - a rapper who touched the masses with his emotional lyrics but was accused of heinous crimes, including assault of a pregnant woman - had never met. The rapper XXXTentacion heard a snippet of the song and, in the weeks before he was killed in June, recorded a fragmentary remake, “Falling Down.” It was one of those songs, “Sunlight on Your Skin,” that would become the trigger for the first posthumous Peep controversy. “We were so happy that it was impossible to make a sad record,” Smokeasac said. Together, they recorded music that’s brighter and more optimistic than the gothic agony he specialized in. “He was moving into a new crew of people that had his back and he was just, like, becoming so happy,” iLoveMakonnen said. ILoveMakonnen, a star of the mid-2010s internet known for his eclectic approach to hip-hop, and a onetime Drake collaborator, sensed anguish in Peep: “He would give his all to everyone and nobody’s giving their all to him.” Peep was then in the process of disentangling himself from the GothBoiClique, the extended collective with which he’d made his ascent. He was joined overseas by iLoveMakonnen, one of his biggest musical influences, and a new, close friend. “He was like, ‘I need to get away from everyone,’” Smokeasac said. Last year, a few months before his death, Peep became fed up with Los Angeles, where his Echo Park apartment had become a de facto crash pad for friends and collaborators. “I was determined to prove to everyone that I was worth the time.” “Still to this day I feel like it was a test,” Smokeasac said in a dim room at TempleBase Studios in Los Angeles, his hair long enough to cover his face and his voice rarely above a reverent whisper. Now he was working with well-established figures: first, Rob Cavallo (My Chemical Romance, Linkin Park) and eventually, Astasio, a member of the Invisible Men songwriting and production trio (Iggy Azalea, Sugababes). It’s not just music, it’s a much bigger responsibility.” She introduced the pair to Astasio, her husband, who became a mentor to Smokeasac.īefore the “Come Over When You’re Sober” sessions, Smokeasac had never recorded in a real studio, or collaborated outside his immediate circle. “It’s a really, really crazy thing to say this but he restored my faith in a higher power,” Stennett said, adding that their relationship “made me understand there is a purpose to what I’m doing. Peep’s agreement with First Access wasn’t a traditional management arrangement, though the First Access co-founder Sarah Stennett became a key guiding force in his career, a quasi-parental figure. Not long after Peep signed his deal with First Access Entertainment, Smokeasac had one too: His first task was to spearhead the “Come Over When You’re Sober” sessions.
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Once they reconnected, Smokeasac became one of Peep’s go-to producers. What they found were Lil Peep’s complete recordings - some finished, some in fragments some heard and familiar, many not.
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Sometime after that, in London, the producer George Astasio and Peep’s longtime musical collaborator Smokeasac finally set out to catalog its contents. In an interview in her cozy Long Island home, sitting on a nondescript couch that belonged to Peep and was shipped cross-country after his death, she calmly recalled walking into an Apple store, handing the laptop to a clerk, and saying: “My son died. First, it went to London, where the files were backed up by First Access Entertainment, the company that helped guide his career. Afterward, attention turned to his computer. Lil Peep died of an accidental drug overdose last November at 21.
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As he got older, the bedrooms changed but his habits didn’t: Almost all of his recording started and finished there. His mother helped him pay for equipment, and he began to build an identity on his laptop, a boy singing and rapping his heart out into a machine. Starting in his teenage years, Lil Peep made music in his bedroom.