The 2010s File Feature
Awful Things
Chart History and Recording Background of "Awful Things" "Awful Things" is a track by Lil Peep, the American singer, rapper, and songwriter born Gustav Elija…
01 The Story
Chart History and Recording Background of "Awful Things"
"Awful Things" is a track by Lil Peep, the American singer, rapper, and songwriter born Gustav Elijah Åhr on November 1, 1996. The song was included on his debut studio album Come Over When You're Sober, Pt. 1, released on August 15, 2017, through First Access Entertainment and Shut Up! Music. The album was a landmark moment in the development of the emo rap and cloud rap subgenres, fusing heavily distorted guitar-driven production with introspective, emotionally raw lyrics delivered over melodic vocal performances. "Awful Things" emerged as one of the album's most emotionally resonant tracks, distinguished by its relatively accessible pop structure compared to some of the project's more abrasive material.
The production of "Awful Things" was handled by Smokeasac, one of Lil Peep's most frequent collaborators during the final years of his life. The track's instrumental draws on a tradition of emo and post-punk influenced hip-hop production, featuring guitar-based melodies that evoke a wistful, melancholic atmosphere. The approach was consistent with Lil Peep's broader aesthetic project, which involved synthesizing the emotional vocabulary of early 2000s emo and pop-punk with the lyrical and rhythmic conventions of contemporary rap. This fusion proved enormously influential and helped establish a new sonic template that numerous subsequent artists would adopt and adapt.
Lil Peep recorded "Awful Things" as part of a remarkably prolific creative period in 2016 and 2017, during which he released multiple projects and established himself as one of the most distinctive emerging voices in alternative rap. His recording approach was characterized by intimacy and directness, often favoring raw, unpolished vocal takes that conveyed emotional authenticity over technical perfection. This aesthetic choice resonated deeply with younger listeners who found mainstream pop's high-gloss production alienating and sought music that felt more personal and immediate.
The song appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 9, 2017, at position 79, the track's only week on the chart. This entry came after Lil Peep's death on November 3, 2017, from an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 21. The posthumous chart appearance reflected an outpouring of grief and renewed public interest in his catalog following the news of his passing. Streams of his music increased dramatically in the days following his death, as fans sought to commemorate him and many new listeners discovered his work for the first time through the extensive media coverage surrounding the tragedy.
The circumstances of "Awful Things" reaching the Hot 100 were bittersweet, as the chart success was entirely posthumous. Lil Peep had not lived to see his debut album receive the broader mainstream attention that followed his death. The posthumous recognition extended well beyond the Hot 100 chart; obituaries and retrospectives in major music publications that had previously paid little attention to the emo rap scene now identified him as a generational talent whose influence was already being felt across multiple genres.
Following his death, the management of his estate and catalog worked to complete and release additional material. Come Over When You're Sober, Pt. 2 was released posthumously in 2018 and also charted, demonstrating that his audience remained deeply engaged with his music long after his passing. The YouTube presence of "Awful Things" grew substantially over the following years, eventually accumulating hundreds of millions of views, a testament to the ongoing discovery of his work by successive waves of listeners who found his emotional directness compelling.
Critically, Come Over When You're Sober, Pt. 1 was reassessed in the years following the artist's death as an important artifact of a transitional moment in popular music. Many reviewers noted that the album, and "Awful Things" in particular, demonstrated a rare ability to communicate genuine emotional pain in terms that were musically accessible without being sanitized or commercially hollow. This combination of vulnerability and accessibility defined his legacy and ensured that his catalog continued to find new listeners years after his untimely death.
The song's chart history, brief as it was on the Hot 100, nonetheless represented a meaningful moment in the broader arc of emo rap's journey from the underground to mainstream recognition. The fact that a track with such uncompromising emotional content could reach the Billboard Hot 100, even posthumously, signaled a genuine shift in what American mainstream popular music audiences were willing to embrace in terms of mood, production aesthetic, and lyrical subject matter.
02 Song Meaning
Themes and Meaning of "Awful Things"
"Awful Things" addresses the pain of romantic betrayal and emotional damage within a relationship, framed through a perspective that is simultaneously accusatory and self-aware. The speaker describes a connection in which a partner has repeatedly caused hurt, with the phrase "awful things" serving as a shorthand for a pattern of harmful behavior that has accumulated over time. The song does not detail specific incidents but rather captures the cumulative emotional weight of a relationship characterized by dysfunction and repeated disappointment.
One of the central tensions in the song is the coexistence of deep emotional attachment and clear-eyed awareness of harm. The speaker seems to understand that the relationship is damaging, yet the pull of romantic connection makes departure difficult. This dynamic, the simultaneous recognition of harm and the difficulty of disengagement, was a recurring theme in Lil Peep's songwriting and contributed significantly to his appeal among listeners navigating similarly complicated emotional situations. He articulated a state of feeling trapped by love without romanticizing the trap itself.
The production reinforces the emotional content in meaningful ways. The melancholic guitar melody that underlies the track creates a sense of wistfulness and nostalgia, suggesting that the relationship being mourned was also, at some point, a source of genuine warmth. This contrast between the remembered sweetness of a connection and the present reality of its damage is central to what makes the song emotionally complex. Rather than presenting the other person as simply villainous, the lyrical approach acknowledges the complexity of intimate relationships where love and harm can coexist.
Cultural reception of "Awful Things" was shaped considerably by the circumstances of Lil Peep's death. After he passed away in November 2017 from an accidental overdose, listeners and critics returned to his catalog seeking to understand how his public artistic output related to the inner life that had ended so abruptly. Many found in "Awful Things" a particularly resonant expression of the emotional fragility that had characterized his persona throughout his career. The song was widely shared in the days following his death as a form of collective mourning.
The song also resonated because of its frank engagement with emotional vulnerability in a masculine voice. In mainstream popular music, expressions of heartbreak, self-doubt, and emotional damage had historically been more associated with certain genres than with rap. Lil Peep's willingness to fuse the confessional tradition of emo and post-punk with hip-hop aesthetics created a space for listeners who identified with both traditions but had found neither fully satisfying on its own. "Awful Things" exemplified this synthesis clearly and accessibly.
In retrospect, the song is understood as part of a broader body of work that helped normalize emotional directness in alternative rap and contributed to the emergence of artists who would follow similar creative paths in subsequent years. The track stands as a document of a particular emotional experience, young love gone wrong, rendered with an honesty that transcended the specific circumstances of its creation and touched something universal in listeners across age groups and backgrounds. Its enduring popularity on streaming platforms years after its release reflects the timeless quality of its emotional subject matter.
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