Call me old-fashioned, but I believe the word “lore” should be reserved for the truly mythological—blood oaths, miracles, golden fleeces, snakes for hair, that kind of thing. But then there’s Drain Gang, whose eldritch vision of rap represents peak e-boy cool, and whose de facto leader, Bladee, is exalted by gothic teenagers, esoteric shitposters, and pop It Girls alike. As a musician and “historical online figure,” to borrow a quote from Lil B the Based God, his lore is so heavy that he feels almost out of reach—in this world but not of it, to paraphrase John the Apostle. So I am certain that our plan to meet at his house will fall through until he appears on WhatsApp, sending his train stop and an address in a message that self-deletes after a day.
The January sun sets at 3 p.m. here in Stockholm, but this afternoon’s twilight is lit up by a waxing crescent moon and the glow of star-shaped lanterns hanging in nearly every window. The city streets are sound-proofed by a blanket of fresh snow, even quieter than they’d be otherwise this time of year. Today most businesses are closed for a national holiday known as Trettondedag Jul (also called “Epiphany”) in remembrance of the Wise Men’s visit to the baby Jesus, antiquated but nevertheless observed. Aboard a southbound Metro heading outside of the city, lines from an old Christmas hymn float up from memory—“Field and fountain, moor and mountain, following yonder star”—and I realize they almost sound like Bladee lyrics.
An unshoveled path winds from the train station to a small apartment complex. I buzz my way inside. The door swings open before I’ve finished knocking, and Benjamin Reichwald greets me with a frail but friendly hug. As Bladee, he’s known to dress like a mythic streetwear demon at an apocalyptic rave, but here he appears in couch potato uniform: a black zip-up hoodie and sweatpants, both splattered in old paint. A knife-shaped silver amulet glinting from his neck (“blade” is how you pronounce Bladee) is the only visible hint I’m in the presence of an artist whose reputation borders on the messianic—the unofficial shadow king of weird internet music.
A shy Swedish teenager who’d found a voice in punk rock and graffiti early on, Bladee emerged in the mid-2010s as the LiveMixtapes era gave way to SoundCloud rap. It was easier back then to classify him as a rapper—operating in the melodic mode that most rappers did—though his beats drew from trance and J-pop and his lyrics sometimes bent in otherworldly directions. (A line about designer glasses from his debut mixtape, 2014’s Gluee, was cloaked in Dark Age horror: “Money shield rain, Gucci eyes, distant vision/Black magician, holy sword, evil spirit.”) It was as if he had combined the sensibilities of James Ferraro, Chief Keef, and Elliott Smith, then steeped it all in Norse mythology and anime melodrama. But as the years passed, his music seemed to shimmer with new Jungian significance, like he’d sunk deep in his psyche and resurfaced as a modern mystic.
Reichwald moved out of the city and into this apartment a couple weeks ago with his girlfriend, Monacco, a pale, black-clad brunette who could be mistaken for his twin. A small bedroom is lofted above the living room, which is minimally decorated with a two-foot neon star statue plugged in next to the TV, and a couple dozen books stacked along the windowsill. I page through Arcana Cœlestia, a thick 18th-century theological text in Swedish, before Reichwald asks, “Have you read that one?” pointing to Juicy J’s memoir, Chronicles of the Juice Man. “It’s pretty sick.”
They haven’t had much time to organize the place; the back room, which will become the painting studio, is strewn with spray paint cans, Furby and Monchhichi dolls, and piles of gifted clothing he plans to give away. He spent December touring Europe, performing songs from last April’s Cold Visions—a manic, 30-track tour de force that tied together the past decade of his music, while still grasping for answers as to what all of this quasi-philosophical world-building might mean.
Recorded in a two-week burst not long before his 30th birthday, Cold Visions spiraled between euphoria and Promethean torment, pushing past nihilism and onwards to ego death. It was his darkest and most acclaimed project in years, corresponding with his biggest North American shows to date. But when I ask if 2024 was a good year for him personally, Reichwald replies, “Kind of, yeah,” then immediately doubles back: “Not really. It’s OK.” He laughs at himself, then goes on. “It doesn’t matter that much to me if I’m successful or not. On paper, my year was really good, but it was up and down.” He recorded Cold Visions towards the end of what he now sees as a long depressive spell, which manifested into chronic illness. “I think I developed fatigue symptoms from having anxiety for a long time. I had no energy. My immune system was so bad, so I was sleeping most of the time,” he says. “I tried to make other music, but that was the only album I could make at that time—more like a diary, a conversation with myself.”
I’d imagined talking to Bladee might be something like talking to a sphinx: dealing in runes and riddles that echoed lyrical motifs of ice swords, trapdoors, magic fountains, inauspicious tarot cards, angel numbers, and so forth. As a persona, he appears to be inscrutable on purpose—detached and otherworldly, with a face that sometimes seems to change from photo to photo when it’s not hidden by sunglasses or slathered in corpse paint.
But in person he is chatty and forthcoming, his unhurried delivery and Scandinavian accent combining to lend his thoughts a ceremonious flair. (Words like “funny” or “graffiti” unfurl like little scrolls.) “I don’t really identify with being mysterious,” he says, pouring two steaming cups of tea from a flowery china teapot. “When [Drain Gang] were starting to make music, we didn’t get any requests for interviews, or we would get really stupid requests that just wanted to talk about how we knew Yung Lean. Then I was too shy for a long time—like, I couldn’t have done it, it would have been really bad. I think I’m more relaxed when I’m a bit more in the open,” he decides. “I think I feel more free.”
The best-known artifact from Reichwald’s illustrious career as a top-tier shitposter is a tweet from 2015: “Yoo chill im just a vessel ! didnt mean to flex on u bro Im just a vessel.” He’s forgotten the logic behind a few choice posts from before he left the platform (“In the shower that is life Let me be the soap,” reads one from 2018. He cackles. “What did I mean by that?”). But the vessel one, he remembers. “I definitely dissociate from actually being an artist—like, it’s not me trying to be anything special,” he articulates slowly. “I think I find it hard to take credit for, and identify with, what I’m doing. But I always liked the music that we made,” he adds. “And I think I always believed in it, even when it wasn’t necessarily doing good. Because we liked it—our friends—and we were having fun making it.”
The collective known today as Drain Gang—Bladee, Ecco2k, Thaiboy Digital, and Whitearmor, who all mostly grew up in Stockholm, though they’re spread out further now—posted their first compilation as a free MediaFire download in the summer of 2013. Back then, the conversation around another young Swedish interpreter of cool American rap, Yung Lean (whose “Ginseng Strip 2002” had blown up earlier that year), mostly concerned his position as an outsider, for better or worse. That discourse feels quaint a decade or so later; despite what American protectionist impulses may linger, rap is now the lingua franca of youth. Besides, I always thought the interesting topic wasn’t the Swedes’ outlander status but their specific point of access—a world built in the image of Bay Area rapper Lil B.
Reichwald was a teenager when he learned about Lil B, the pioneer of “weird Twitter” who released his mystic mindspray at an unfathomable clip starting in the late aughts. When they weren’t playing in their punk band or tagging local train stations, Reichwald and his friends (including Ecco, and later Whitearmor and Thaiboy) would smoke weed and record their own based freestyles. From Lil B’s 2012 “Bang Remix,” Reichwald discovered Chief Keef and began obsessively listening to his Back from the Dead mixtape. “There was something special about it, something new. It was electric,” he reminisces from the couch as our tea gets cold. “I don’t know if it’s just getting old, thinking, ‘It used to be so good.’ But since then, there hasn’t really been a new thing with that energy.” He found inspiration, too, in the divisive output of Soulja Boy and Riff Raff; he’d watched the latter with his family on MTV’s From G’s to Gents, which had somehow made it to Swedish network TV.
During his time as a teenage graffiti artist, Reichwald got caught just once; the police brought him to the station to watch videos of vandals who’d been run over by trains. Though he grew out of the hobby as he got more into hip-hop, he looks back on that era as the foundation for his work as Bladee. “I had a lot of problems with being shy,” he says of his childhood. “Graffiti taught me that you can write your name on the wall and manifest yourself into spaces.”
In early freestyle sessions among friends, they rapped in Swedish, but as the members of Drain Gang began to take music more seriously, it was a given that their songs would be in English. “We would never have been able to do anything in Sweden,” Reichwald explains. “It had to go first to America and become big.” Back then Drain Gang was known as a counterpart to Sad Boys—Yung Lean’s rap collective whose songs sounded like this ;(—though none of that mattered when I first came upon Bladee’s 2016 album Eversince. Over the arctic sparkle of Whitearmor’s production, Bladee’s melancholic sing-song stopped me in my tracks.
The first born got his world torn
I came out of the ice storm
This blood sword is my light source
At the white shores when the night falls
Was my life form worth to cry for
Off like 10 pills, now I'm stillborn.
His Auto-Tuned rap-singing brought the hedonistic doldrums that define rap’s last 15 years to the brink of existential crisis, as songs about Prada backpacks and fanciful knives mingled with declarations of utter nothingness: “I am not anyone, I’m just some air inside the air,” he warbled on “Hotel Breakfast” in 2021. He seemed to wallow mournfully in the material world while nurturing the embers of a secret spark, and in his songs myth functioned in the Jungian conception: as an intermediary between the conscious and unconscious. As he’s built his catalog since 2014’s Gluee—16 solo and collaborative full-lengths, plus a handful of EPs—he’s conjured up a universe that hints at something cosmic behind its imagery, an almost Gnostic search for meaning within a centuries-old battle between lightness and dark.
When I press Reichwald for answers on his lyrics’ deeper meaning, he hesitates to say, mainly because he’s still not entirely sure himself. Early on in his career, he says, “I wasn’t really into these deep ideas—I was just trying to make something that sounds cool.” In time, though, certain lyrics would align with texts his friends would send him, or ideas he’d stumble upon in Google rabbit holes, and his interest in spirituality and metaphysics expanded. He’s gotten into books on alchemy and mysticism, describing one he recently finished, the Swedish playwright and writer August Strindberg’s neurotic, paranoid, largely autobiographical 1897 novel Inferno. “It’s pretty sick, because he’s seeking out this forbidden knowledge. Then he starts getting punished, because he’s kind of doing black magic,” he says with a smile. “And then he starts getting tormented by demons, and learning how to appreciate the suffering. Yeah, that’s pretty dope.”
But with each song he makes, Reichwald finds himself getting closer to an indescribable feeling that he’s harbored since his childhood. “I never planned how I was going to make my music. I’m aware there’s some world-building going on, but I never set out to do anything like that,” he explains. He tells me he wants to get closer to his idea of perfection with his music, which soon takes on a more divine connotation. “But I think, also, you can’t get to God,” he goes on carefully. “God is like the infinite expression that I keep trying to get closer to, but I always end up back at nothing.” For years now in his lyrics, he has called himself King Nothingg—not a coronation but an un-manifestation, an uncoupling from himself.
Earlier in his career, it frustrated Reichwald when listeners would misunderstand him; he decided that the problem was his body of work was too small. “I feel like it’s to my advantage to make more stuff—then the idea becomes clearer for me, too,” he says, though the answers still escape him. “Even with drawing when I was young—I’m not that good. I feel like my hands are flawed. That’s how I feel with my singing, too. But I feel like my strength is that I have this strive—a goal, or something pulling me.” His pale eyes flicker behind a dark curtain of hair. “For me, to strive for something is like a representative of God.”
It’s hard to tell how famous anybody really is these days. “Bladee has dropped another instant classic fit pic, his first of 2025, looking very chic and dapper,” read the first post on my For You page the morning of our interview, though surely my algorithm had clocked my obsessive replays of his 2020 album, 333. At home, Reichwald explains, his work goes relatively unnoticed compared to the Swedish-language drill rap that’s been big in recent years, though he’s seen its popularity wane as an unprecedented influx of gang violence has left Sweden with the second-highest gun death rate per capita in Europe. The only notable Swedish publication to write about Cold Visions was a local finance newspaper, Dagens industri, though Reichwald clarifies that it wasn’t a review: “It was saying that I was the only Swedish artist that was in the top ten of the Pitchfork end-of-year list,” he laughs. (His mom sent him the clipping.)
In America, and on the internet, it’s a different story. The online Drainer demographic has been rabid for years, as it’s evolved from 4chan doomer types to something much more PLUR. But at some point last year, it began to feel like Bladee was an actual celebrity—somewhere between Cold Visions and his verse on the Brat remix album, where he brushed elbows with pop’s A-list. (Shortly after its release, the first “Bladee stuns in new photo” graced the annals of Pop Crave.) In any case, the vibe had shifted, and King Nothingg reigned supreme.
“I always thought it would be funny to be famous,” Reichwald giggles, sinking back into the couch. Still, he was surprised by the turnout for the Cold Visions Tour, whose New York and L.A. shows drew his biggest crowds to date. It shocked him, too, to see how young the audience was. Though Reichwald’s 1994 birth year lands him on the young end of millennial, the Drainer aesthetic—maximally textured, glitchy, lo-res, and androgynous—registers as distinctly Gen Z, with some of the newer fans on the cusp of Gen Alpha. (Outside his Brooklyn show last fall, there was a separate line for ticket holders 26 and up, which commenters dubbed the “unc fastpass.”) “With this kind of music, people expect us to be younger,” Reichwald readily admits. “But then, I understand: I would think someone that’s 30 was really old when I was 18.” And though much of Cold Visions played out like an existential crisis (“I got so old, I got embarrassed to even be here,” went one much-quoted line from “PARANOIA INTRO”), it corresponded with his unlikely position as an e-boy in his 30s whose new music still feels fresh.
It was also released on his own independent label, Trash Island, a notable break from a series of albums put out on Drain Gang’s former label and management company YEAR0001. Since its launch in 2015, the Stockholm label and creative studio had been heavily involved in the careers of Drain Gang and Sad Boys, though certain Cold Visions lyrics had fueled speculation that Bladee was distancing himself from his longtime label. (“Fuck giving these lames percentage,” he huffed on “PM2.”) In a since-deleted Instagram post last November, Yung Lean confirmed the split: “I want to set the record straight about something that has been happening for some time... I’m not working with year0001 anymore—they are not my record label, my management company, or my merchandiser,” he wrote, emphasizing that the merch sold at a recent label pop-up was not backed by himself or Drain Gang. Bladee shared the post to his story with an added caption: “We are Not working or affiliated with the year0001 label no wayyy.”
With a court case between the label and its former artists ongoing, Reichwald can’t say much about the situation. “It just ended bad,” he reiterates politely. “A lot of stuff wasn’t what we thought it was, so we had to part ways. I don’t owe them my next five projects, so it is what it is.”
Emilio Fagone, the co-founder and artistic director at Year0001, felt the split was “coordinated and personal.” In an email, Fagone writes that he was “disappointed we couldn’t talk about our disagreements face to face. When you’re as intertwined as we were, you’d expect there to be conflict but I can wholeheartedly say our intentions were pure. In the end, all we got was a very long letter from a lawyer.”
I tell Reichwald about Fagone’s response. “We always trusted them as friends, but when we got a lawyer it was brought to our attention that a lot of things were not in order or standard,” he replies. “It was not a personal decision, but a professional one, to part ways.”
This leaves Reichwald at an interesting juncture: At nearly 31 years old, he is more relevant than ever to his legion of young fans, free to use his newfound cachet in any way he chooses. But when I ask what he’s been up to when he’s not working on music, he stumbles: “Mmm, what have I been up to? Umm…” He occasionally enjoys attending art and fashion parties, but he describes his natural state as borderline ascetic. “Sometimes I do nothing to the point where I’m pushed to the edge of my existence, and I have to create something.” He feels happiest in moments when inspiration comes, describing the art life with an almost evangelical earnestness. “That’s what’s important to me: when I feel my purpose,” he says serenely, “and when I make better things every time.”
Often in the aftermath of releasing an album, Reichwald becomes convinced that he has nothing more to say. “But then,” he says, “something appears.” He isn’t ready just yet to enter his next phase, though he has an idea of how it’s going to be. “I want to make something with Whitearmor again, and it’s going to be something more positive,” he says slowly. “I don’t want to jinx it, but it’s something with Saint George—I’m trying to use Saint George to make some music.” Which saint is that? I wonder, and he responds with a smile: “Oh, he’s the one killing the dragon.”
