Review: Cold Visions by Bladee

and a lot of other words about bladee

Did this ten years, how many more?

When I retire burn the corpse

Am I the freshest? Yes of course

But it’ll never be like before

Don’t even know what I want anymore

Life has a chance through any storm

-Bladee, “Lucky Luke”, Cold Visions (2024)

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I really love Bladee. It's hard to talk about art that you love, but I'm going to try to in this piece. This is a review of Bladee's latest album, Cold Visions. I have to explain a lot of other things about Bladee to explain it.

First off, I guess, it’s pronounced with a silent soft e. But often on his songs he jokes about how to pronounce Bladee, and other singers he features will pronounce it with the double E, as Bladey. I think what he was going for with the second E is an extended feeling to the termination of the word blade, as if it’s extending out like a sword. It reminds me of the little hook on the sword of “Perseus with the Head of Medusa” in the Met; functionally unnecessary but creating greater aesthetic balance. Anyways. In his first album Gluee, he uses this stylization of double Es a few times. Bladee is second language English, growing up in Sweden, and he often sees the English language in creative ways.

Cold Visions is Bladee’s 16th album on Spotify since 2014’s Gluee. Before Gluee, he made music on Soundcloud, some of which is very good, but I think he intentionally doesn’t want it on Spotify because in this early music he’s still working through the ideas he’d later develop more fully. In the Soundcloud music he sings about swords and drugs and the computer and luxury brands. I really like the part when he says “holy sword shadow blade my girlfriend looks like anime, never had a car but I’m still inhaling the candy paint” in his feature on “Plastic Boy” with Yung Lean, from this time period, but he’s grown a lot since then. 

I think fundamental to understanding Bladee is that he really cares about his music. He has a very high output, producing way more music than other musicians. And all of this output is extremely stylized, with very high effort production, doing something sonically and thematically different on every album. He sings in English, even though that’s not his first language, because there’s a larger audience for art in English. He never signed to a traditional record label, and for a long time he was an artist with a dedicated but small cult following. It’s still fair to say that he has a cult following, Bladee makes the kind of music that it’s hard to care about a medium amount, but the cult has gotten a lot bigger in the past four years.

Bladee sees his music as art, and he does visual art too, but I think what he does is in some ways beyond art. Or at least art as a secret mystery to be deciphered, art as highbrow. He’s interested in art as visceral. On his song “Gatekeeper” from Working on Dying, where he sings about not fitting together with a girl and rejecting record labels, he says "fuck being an artist, I still will go the hardest”, and I feel like that’s the Bladee ethos.

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Bladee’s music can be hard to explain because he frequently collaborates. To briefly categorize his output:

BLADEE ALBUMS: Gluee (2014), Eversince (2016), Working on Dying (2017), Red Light (2018), Icedancer (2018), Exeter (2020), 333 (2020), The Fool (2021), Spiderr (2022), Cold Visions (2024)

DRAIN GANG ALBUMS: D&G (2017, with Thaiboy Digital and Ecco2k), Trash Island (2019, with Thaiboy Digital and Ecco2k)

COLLABORATION ALBUMS: AvP (2016, with Thaiboy Digital), Good Luck (2020, with Mechatok), Crest (2022, with Ecco2k), Psykos (2024, with Yung Lean)

This isn’t Bladee’s full post-Soundcloud discography, as he also has many singles that are released separately and never appear on any album, and features with other artists, but it’s most of it. 

An essential part of Bladee’s music is “Drain Gang”, which he frequently references in his lyrics. Drain Gang consists of Ecco2k and Thaiboy Digital as other singers, and Whitearmor and Yung Sherman as producers. Bladee sings about the characters in Drain Gang throughout his songs, even songs they aren’t featured on. Drain Gang is also affiliated with Bladee’s merchandise, which is sometimes stylized and priced like luxury fashion brands and Bladee clearly puts a lot of effort into it. On his song “Nike Just Do It” from Red Light he says “that’s not a real drain shirt, yeah it’s a fake bro”, playing with the idea that his Drain Gang merch is so good people want to make fakes of it.

Bladee has two Drain Gang albums, where he and Ecco and Thaiboy trade leading songs united by production style. Drain Gang members also frequently feature on his solo albums. Sometimes he refers to drain gang as D9, or just with the number 9, because “Drain Gang” is 9 letters and 9 is a cool number. He also sometimes talks about “GTB”, short for “Gravity Boys”, or “Shield Gang” which were two earlier names for the group. I think he came up with “Drain Gang” as a concept in 2015 or 2016, because it never appears on Gluee but appears a lot on Icedancer.

Bladee stuck with the Drain Gang name because drain is also an ideology in his early music. He frequently uses “drain” as a verb, like “take a knife and drain your life” appearing multiple times on Icedancer, and “if you’re not bleeding you’re not drained out” in “Xd Out” on Eversince. Those are some of Bladee’s darker lines, but still the general ideology of his albums in this period. Late nights, drug use, despair, bleeding out the essence of the world. But I don’t think the Drain Gang attitude is entirely a suicidal disregard for life. He’s also very silly on these same albums, joking on Working on Dying and Red Light that Drain Gang is the new One Direction, the new pop collective that people obsesses over.

In around 2017 Bladee starts using the phrase “eat the night” in his music, which I think translates the drain ethos into an actionable phrase.

If I can’t eat the night, Imma let it eat me - “Redlight Moments”, Working on Dying 

No life left, eat the night, no stars out - “No Life Left”, D&G

Eat the night, I feel like Kirby, I’m burning - “For You”, Red Light

Trash star eat the night I do it twice - “Decay”, Red Light

Fuck your life, eat the night like I’m a Homer - “Linkin”, Icedancer 

Eat the night like a locust, we don’t care we brush shoulders - “Bentley”, from Thaiboy Digital’s Legendary Member 

He explains “eat the night” and “drain” in an interview with Vice that’s no longer on the internet: 

“Drain is about loss and gain; it could be good or bad — you could be drained of energy or you could drain something to gain energy. There’s financial, emotional and physical drains, for example — you could just be draining your bank account at the store. It doesn’t have to be deep. Basically, if I’m talking about ‘eating the night’ that means I drain it for its essence. Everything me and my bros do is connected to that concept — we might drain some blood for good fortune.”

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Drain Gang helps Bladee’s music feel like a world, but like all good art it’s the details that make the world feel full. Bladee has a unique lyrical style that switches between personal and mythical. Sometimes he’s silly, or sings about things that you wouldn’t really consider beautiful. Bladee loves cars and namedropping cities, but he also loves sewers and malls. The best way to explain more is to give representative examples.

I stay out of sight, it's a satellite life
Got a shadow ice knife, Gucci lenses on my eyes
Bank account match my clothing size
That explains the price of my shoes

- “Deletee (Intro), from Gluee

I don’t know exactly what Bladee means by shadow ice knife, but it’s some sort of fantasy object, and it sits right next to Gucci sunglasses in the same lonely world. Bladee is often emotionally vulnerable within the lonely world of swords and drugs and brands:

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 ten pills, now I'm stillborn

- Bloodveil/Stillborn, from Eversince

Waiting for forever for my weapon
Waiting for my best friend outside 7-Eleven
Sometimes I just wanna go to heaven
When I'm coming home they call me Vännen

-”7-Eleven”, from Bladee’s 2016 EP rip bladee

Vännen is Swedish for friend, meaning that when Bladee goes back to Sweden people still remember him and care about him.

As he got a little older, in Working on Dying and Red Light and Icedancer, Bladee sings about swords a little less, and drugs a little bit more. Though he stops singing about swords, Working on Dying is maybe Bladee at his most depressive, and then he gets a little happier and sillier in Red Light and Icedancer.

I don't know about you but me I fiend that darkness
Sleep-sleep-walking burn my fucking carcass
I know they hating on the low, I caught it
Hole in my head, I'm tryna find out who God is
Ooh you're a goddess, you're flawless
I'm smoking cabbage you're smoking on that garbage
Fuck being an artist I still will go the hardest
You a worker I see your ass at Target

“Gatekeeper”, from Working on Dying

Put a pill in a McFlurry I'm goofy
Shoot me, acting for the cameras, it's a movie
I can see you're gloomy 'cause I'm too t'd
I'm a dog on the roof like Snoopy
Sue me, hate me 'cause you're not me
I'm a white boy, 30 in my khakis
In the Uber and I sleep, fuck a car key
Love the smell of gasoline, bleach, and sharpies

-“I’m Goofy”, from Red Light

I'm a mallwhore and my Pradas look like Tom Ford
Black gloves on, yeah, I'm lookin’ hardcore
Hitman, yeah, I'm rockin' with the dark lord
If you all for me, baby, then I'm all yours
Sometimes I don't understand what it's all for
But I understand when they see me then they all sore
Death knockin' on my door, that's the front door
Dip out of the back door, hop into the black Porsche

-”Mallwhore Freestyle”, from Icedancer

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In 2020 and 2021 Bladee’s music changed more. His 2019 single “Apple”, which doesn’t appear on an album, is the fulcrum between these two periods. His immediate album after “Apple”, called 333 has no singers besides Bladee, as does Good Luck, and The Fool only has one very brief Thaiboy feature. But more than moving away from his frequent collaborators, Bladee’s lyrics and musical style became more optimistic and less playful. He doesn’t talk about late nights or drugs or suicide as much, and starts referencing Catholic and Buddhist words. The first album of this period, 333 inverts 666, the satan numbers, which are sometimes referenced in earlier Bladee’s darker music. He has lots of self-improvement style lines, like “turn your mental prison into a maze” from “Noblest Strive” and “Inspiration Comes”. He does the Kanye thing where doesn’t use bad words on The Fool.

I’m a good boy on the track, no cussing - “Hotel Breakfast”, The Fool

The sounds of the music in this time period are very pleasant. Bladee’s early music can sometimes be dissonant and inaccessible, but I can put on “Hotel Breakfast” from The Fool for anyone and it will sound like a nice light pop song.

Bladee doesn’t reference Drain Gang nearly as much in this time period, but he does occasionally. Sometimes he’s referential to his older music in a way that inverts it. In The Fool’s “Let’s Ride” he says “I gave away my Moncler in the sacrifice”, referencing the Moncler jacket that he speaks about with affection on “Romeo” in Eversince. In “Gatekeeper” from Working on Dying he said “pop out like a gopher” to evoke leaving the house for the first time late at night, and in The Fool’s “Hotel Breakfast” he inverts that to the much more pro getting-out-of-bed “pop out like a toast”. But in the song he still is waking up too late to go to the hotel breakfast.

He doesn’t explicitly reference swords, but he spends a lot more time thinking about the concept of nobility. One of the center songs of 333 is “Hero of My Story 3style3”, which samples the Lord of the Rings Two Towers movie and is about being a noble hero in your own small world.

They want to know how I am so trendy
Thirty-three they say I got too many
Be like me, let me know when you ready
Metal round my wrist, it's weighing heavy
Wanna be the hero of my story
Baby if you let me be annoying
Wanna wake up early in the morning
I just never wanted to be boring

In 2022, Bladee released Crest, which is a collab album with Ecco2K. Crest was written and recorded before The Fool but released after. It’s Bladee at his lightest, using Ecco’s ethereal voice to play up almost religious songs. In Crest he uses some latin Catholic words in a way that feels like ritual, like leaning on “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” on “5 Star Crest”. And he also has a song called “Desire Is A Trap”, going deeper into the Buddhist ideas. Crest kind of sounds like “Christ” on the breathy delivery that he does in “Yeses (Red Cross)”, and I think that’s on purpose.

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After Crest came Spiderr. Spiderr sheds the spiritual optimism of Bladee’s prior four albums but isn’t totally like earlier Bladee. Spiderr is stylistically all over the place from song-to-song; “I Am Slowly But Surely Losing Hope” sounds like 2000s pop-punk, and is followed by “Icarus 3Reestyle” which samples the CS:GO match start timer. The lead single “Drain Story” is the most offputting and dissonant tracks on the album, with Bladee’s voice not quite lining up with a very strange backing track. I think the dissonance is intentional and the idea of the album. Bladee has most of the song titles stylized in all caps, but two of them aren’t, and the album art is a kind of weird image of a really muscular but still androgynous male that looks like League of Legends splash art.

Thematically it seems like what Bladee wants to do in Spiderr is unite the comsmic optimistic world of the 333/Crest/Good Luck/The Fool music with the earlier style of his music. He opens my favorite song on Spiderr “Icarus 3Reestyle” by proclaiming “three plus three plus three is nine” meaning that the cosmic spiritual optimism of his recent past adds up to Drain Gang/D9 worldview. But that union doesn’t say either one of them is wrong, and the sonic dissonance is a reminder that they don’t totally fit together.

It took Bladee a long time to release another album after Spiderr, almost eighteen months, one of his longest gaps. In March 2024 he released Psykos, a collaboration with Yung Lean, which is kind of a strange album. Bladee and Yung Lean have collaborated since the beginning of both of their careers, but this album is pretty different than their other songs together. Usually Bladee and Yung Lean collabs are playful and casual, where they trade verses and rap about being successful, but this doesn’t feel as much like that. Psykos seems like him and Lean doing late 90s early 2000s sad slow style alternative music. I’m still not quite sure what to think of it.

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A month after Psykos Bladee released Cold Visions, which is totally different. It’s a Bladee solo album. On the second song of Cold Visions “WODrainer”, Bladee calls Cold Visions “Working on Dying 2”, and the acronym WOD in appended to “drainer” in the title also evokes Working on Dying as well as the earlier Drain ethos in general. Cold Visions brings back F1lthy, the producer of Working on Dying, who also has a production company that he calls Working On Dying. Like Working on Dying, Cold Visions has tons of features, featuring Thaiboy many times, Ecco once, and multiple features from Yung Lean that are more in the traditional vein of Yung Lean and Bladee collaborations.

Cold Visions goes far deeper into the early Drain Gang world than Spiderr did, sometimes bringing back the solipsistic drug use and nihilism of the Working on Dying era. “I Don’t Like People” opens with “I’m drunk on NyQuil, wanting to kill, even if it’s God’s will I just can’t chill”, with Bladee repeating the title phrase “I don’t like people” a lot of times.

But it’s not entirely a return to that earlier world. Like his past few albums, Bladee often inverts his older music. He inverts the light Bladee period more often. In “Hotel Breakfast” from the The Fool he sang “I am king nothing, I am nothing, take a bunch of empty words and make them mean something.” Here in Cold Visions he inverts the “king nothing” phrase in the song titled “King Nothingg” that’s full of screaming background noises and the phrase “hail king nothing, only king that kills for nothing”, taking what was previously about insignificance into nihilism for the sake of evil. On that same song he flips “I’m a good boy on the track no cussing” from “Hotel Breakfast” to “I’ve been going back to cussing”, which is cute.

But he also he inverts and brings back motifs from his earlier darker albums.

Missing person, I’m a missing person. I’m gone that’s for certain. If they love me I might hurt them, so I stay behind the curtain - “Missing Person”, Eversince

I’m a missing person, I go off the radar - “Rip”, Eversince

To catch my drift I’m going fishing, on my way back from going missing - “Flexing and Finessing” Cold Visions

Other times he reinforces them:

No touching, I find it disgusting - “Who Goes There”, Eversince

I’ve been enforcing the policy: no touching - “King Nothingg”, Cold Visions

In “Wodrainer” Bladee brings back the line “I know I fell off but this is the comeback”, which he says word-for-word on Icedancer’s “Topman”, and that’s a funny thing to say twice. It’s interesting that Bladee says that on both Icedancer and Cold Visions, both of which are doing very similar things to the album before them, but arguably better and definitely more stylized. It’s not a super widely held opinion that Bladee “fell off” with Spiderr, but he says it about himself.

Bladee also brings back singing about fantasy objects:

I’m in a forest with a high priest, I’m in off-white Nike like a hypebeast - “Yung Sherman”

Heavy two-handed axe in a dirty duffle bag - “Sad Meal”

But he seems to sort of be joking this time, whereas in his older music he’s serious about it. And again he sings about luxury brands, but in the album manifesto song “Wodrainer” he jokes about designer clothes and says he wants to step out in converse and vans like a suburban teen.

So much designer, got sick of that
So much designer, we been in that
Put it in the trash, we binning that
Let's leave it at that
Stepping out in Converse and Vans

Cold Visions has songs where he’s explicitly talking about drug use, but then also “Dont Do Drugz” where he explicitly sings about how drugs make you feel bad and make your life worse, which evokes the last few Bladee albums, and is more explicitly self-improvement than anything he wrote for those.

So Bladee is sticking together these two worldviews, the dark and light Bladee, and letting them sit next to each other. He switches between them based on what sounds prettier in each song, leaning on the dark side more, but still letting the light shine through.

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Unlike Spiderr’s sonic dissonance, Cold Visions is extremely sonically cohesive. The songs have a uniting bass that feels like it pulses through the whole album, and many of the songs flow into each other one after another. He uses the phrase “Cold Visions” as a production tag many times, and says it many times in the lyrics too:

Let me tell you a little story about this guy that's not important
Let me tell you about these crazy clothes he's sporting
Let me tell you about these cold visions I've been having

-“Flexing and Finessing”

I'm in the battle with myself
But who's winning? I can't tell
Man the visions cold as hell
Man the baddest hand I'm dealt
There's just us, it's no one else
Saddest story I can't tell
But um Gloria excel
But um destiny fulfilled

-“Message to Myself”

Cold winter flowers under snow, is it still living?
Cold vision
Yes, yes, all alone
Summer's indefinitely postponed
I hope, I'll hope
I hope I won't be buried under this snow

-“Cold Visions (Outro 2)”

My name on this part of the internet is cold, so maybe I’m not the best one to speak on this, but I think “Cold Visions” is an evocative phrase that while never totally explained also explains everything it needs to. Cold is both purifying and painful, bleak and isolating, but also a necessary part of the seasonal spin. It’s more pessimistic than optimistic, but that’s okay.

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Cold Visions feels like Bladee launching everything he has to make one really great album that unites his prior ten years of music. I don’t think he could ever do an album that sounded like Cold Visions again; there wouldn’t be a point. This isn’t a grand return to dark Bladee, or even a grand intentional synthesis of dark and light. It’s a tour-de-force to show that he can still do it all again.

I think I still find Gluee and The Fool Bladee’s most interesting albums. Gluee feels like a totally alien arrival, completely fresh ideas created out of nothing in such a raw and pure way. And The Fool is a very emotionally vulnerable album that feels like Bladee’s worldview pushed to its conclusion. But Cold Visions is the Bladee album that goes the hardest. I don’t know if you’ll get it if you haven’t listened to the 16 other Bladee albums, but it also may not be for you. I think he wanted to make something for the fans, for the people that have loved the music he’s made before, before he goes on to make something totally different. But the execution on it is just so great. It’s so fun to listen to him skim the surface of ten years of music with the competence he has a musician now. I’m really glad Bladee is making music. There’s no one else doing it like him.

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“My whole life I’ve had visions of ice.” - coldhealing, “The Gate to The Ice Wall”