As successful as Yeat has become in the last year or so, the features on his projects have been pretty boilerplate for a hugely popular rapper. Young Thug? Check. Gunna? Yep. A song with Lil Uzi Vert? Several, actually. And as good as those collaborations have been, given Yeat’s track record, you’d imagine that for his upcoming album Aftërlyfe (out Friday, February 24), he wouldn’t shake the boat too much.
Not so! Aftërlyfe has a handful of features across its 22 tracks, and only one of them is a person who is not Yeat. YoungBoy Never Broke Again shows up on “Shmunk,” but the rest of the guests – Kranky Kranky, Luh Geeky, and Talking Ben App – are Yeat himself. “Them features is myself im jus different people sometimes,” he wrote on Instagram.
That’s sure to be disappointing/a relief to fans of Talking Ben the Dog — a downloadable, interactive talking dog that you can ask questions of and watch do science experiments. The app is marketed towards young children, but it’s found notoriety thanks to teenage Twitch streamers asking it questions like “Do you love God?”
Yeat frequently raps about not liking to leave the house and his general distrust of people, so maybe it tracks that he’d find comradery in a curmudgeonly cartoon dog. Still, for him to adopt an entire personality around it? It’s either a shrewd attempt to tap into the app’s viral popularity or a genuine balaclava-tip to a children’s game. Either way, we’ll be listening on Friday.