Lil Peep, rainy bear — nuts

Lil Peep's cult bedroom-rap track is broadly charting today, nearly a decade after its original release and eight years after his death. "nuts" first appeared in 2015 as part of the GothBoiClique ecosystem — lo-fi, emotionally raw, passed around SoundCloud before most streaming infrastructure existed for it. The track samples "Bright Lights" from the Jesus Camp documentary soundtrack, a clearance issue that kept the song in legal limbo until a posthumous single re-release in December 2021 through AWAL, which brought it onto major platforms properly for the first time.

Lil Peep remains one of the more durably streamed artists from emo rap's mid-2010s wave, his catalog sustained by a generation that came to him after his 2017 overdose rather than before it. "nuts" sits on the rawer, more skeletal end of that catalog — closer to his SoundCloud roots than the polished posthumous releases — which tends to be what his core audience returns to.