Yung Lean Is Having His Biggest Year Without Releasing an Album

Yung LeanCloud Rap · Stockholm, SwedenArtist profile →

Some of them had been in line since 6 a.m. When Collected Works 2016–2026 opened at Stockholm’s old gasworks on Sept. 25, the crowd at the door included fans from Scotland, Germany, Brazil, the U.S. and Canada, Swedish broadcaster SVT reported. They’d come for paintings, ceramics and dioramas by Jonatan Leandoer Håstad, better known as Yung Lean, most of them never shown in public before.

The show closes tonight (Oct. 11), at the end of the most visible stretch of his 13 years in music. Two days after it opened, he made his U.S. television debut at the MTV VMAs, where “STORM,” his short film with the French duo GENER8ION, was up for Video of the Year. The week before, he’d put out “That’s It” with Future and Metro Boomin for Grand Theft Auto VI. On Friday (Oct. 16), Netflix starts streaming a thriller he acts in. His last album, Jonatan, came out in May 2025, and he hasn’t needed a new one to have his biggest year.

The film that crashed the VMAs

“STORM” arrived in April as a two-part single and a short film directed by Romain Gavras, who makes up GENER8ION with the French producer Surkin. Lean plays the bully at an all-boys boarding school, breaking things and running something close to a fight club, until the second half, “STORM II,” turns into a mass dance on the school steps, choreographed by Damien Jalet.

GENER8ION, “STORM” starring Yung LeanGENER8ION · Watch on YouTube ↗

It went viral, and then it went legit. In August, “STORM” picked up three VMA nominations, including Video of the Year against Taylor Swift, Madonna, Sabrina Carpenter, Ariana Grande and Bruno Mars. “Surprisingly, the underground is in the race for the VMAs top award,” The FADER wrote.

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On Sept. 27, at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, he rebuilt the bleacher finale live: Lean stock-still in a shirt and tie while a crowd of suited dancers convulsed around him, ending with him spitting ice cream at the camera. “STORM” lost Video of the Year to Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia,” and Madonna took Best Choreography, but the ice cream shot was the clip that kept circulating after the broadcast.

GENER8ION feat. Yung Lean perform “STORM” at the 2026 VMAsMTV · Watch on YouTube ↗

A GTA VI song with Future and Metro Boomin

The first six songs from Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album arrived on Sept. 17, and his was the pairing nobody saw coming: Lean and Future over a Metro Boomin instrumental, one of what The FADER called the soundtrack’s “more off-beat collaborations.” “That’s It” is credited to Yung Lean and Metro Boomin, featuring Future, and it’s one of 34 originals on the album, out Nov. 19.

Yung Lean, “That’s It” (feat. Future & Metro Boomin)Atlantic Records · Watch on YouTube ↗

The art he kept to himself

Graffiti came first. He got hooked at 11, he told Artsy (as Hypebeast reported), and by 13 he was painting as Verp with fewcrew, a street-art crew in Hanoi, where he lived for a few years as a young teenager. Apart from a four-piece showing at Stockholm’s Carl Kostyál gallery in 2016, he kept his painting out of view, a way, he has said, of keeping it “pure.” The closest thing to a preview came in June, when he live-painted a mural at adidas’s Stan Smith pop-up during Paris Fashion Week.

Collected Works 2016–2026 puts a decade of it in one building, the Norra Bangården space at Torsgatan 22: paintings, collages, sculpture, drawings, dioramas and installations, curated by his longtime friend Kaj Lindhé Gimdal. He’s self-taught and the work is proudly rough. He has described his own painting as “caveman shit”; El Jefe is a grinning, clownlike ceramic figure; Perfekt Dejt is laid down in thick lines of color; and the diorama Gubben i Lådan, Highsnobiety wrote, looks lifted from a school art fair.

Just like my songs, the work is made through stream of consciousness. I go where the hand takes me.

Jonatan Leandoer Håstad, in the exhibition’s press release, Highsnobiety

The deepest cut is Slåtter, a short film he executive-produced and stars in, which visitors watch through holes in a cement wall. It draws on Swedish folklore, his mother’s cottage and the illustrators John Bauer and Elsa Beskow to replay the strange encounters he had in Sweden’s forests as a child.

No gallerists were directly involved; the show came together largely through friends. He shared a painting studio with Bladee for three years, and he told Artsy the aim is to inspire young artists to do the same, not to make himself a market name. Since around 2016 he’s taken bigger risks, with acrylics, oil sticks, ceramics, video and large-scale work. “I worry less,” he said. “I care less about what other people think.” Admission was free.

What’s next: Netflix, Turin and Vice City

Acting isn’t new for him: in 2018 he made his stage debut in NEAR, a dance-theater piece with Sweden’s Cullberg company built from his diary entries, SVT notes. On Friday (Oct. 16), Netflix starts streaming Sacrifice in the U.S. and France. Gavras directed it; Chris Evans plays a film star kidnapped by a radical played by Anya Taylor-Joy, and Lean plays Arthur, her character’s brother. Charli xcx is in the cast too, and GENER8ION did the score. At the end of the month, he and Bladee are billed together at Turin’s C2C Festival (Oct. 29–Nov. 1), and Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, “That’s It” included, lands Nov. 19.

Thirteen years ago, “Ginseng Strip 2002” made him a Stockholm teenager nobody knew how to take seriously. This year the VMAs, Rockstar and Netflix all did. He summed up the paintings in a line that fits the whole year: “My paintings mean nothing and also everything. Here they are.”