GROWN-UP OF THE YEAR YUNG LEAN

YUNG LEAN IS describing a weeklong silent retreat he went on about three years ago, at a facility in a forest in his home country of Sweden.

- BY EILEEN CARTTER

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Per the program’s parameters, he avoided both spoken and body language, and meditated for eight hours a day.

“There I am with no outlet, just me and my brain,” the 29-year-old musician tells me, shrugging slightly. “Instead of distracting yourself, you just face it.”

This retreat was his first time meditating, ever. But then again, he’s self-admittedly prone to extremes. He gave up coffee, so he started drinking 12 cups of tea a day. When he pops snus, he stuffs three pouches under his lip at the same time. “I guess I took the ‘young boy’ shit to the biggest extent,” he reflects, having survived a touch-and-go decade as an off-the-wall netizen rapper.

When we meet one September afternoon on the outdoor patio of a West Hollywood restaurant, the Stockholm native, born Jonatan Leandoer Håstad, does noticeably look like Grown-Up Lean. His cherubic face is stubblier now. Wearier. His multitude of scrawled tattoos have long since settled into his dermis. Over the course of his career as Sweden's prodigal Sad Boy, Lean has dyed his hair many rebellious hues; today it’s cropped short and in its natural shade of sandy brown, a pair of Prada aviators resting on top of his head.

Sometime between the forest meditation and now, he looked at himself in the mirror and thought: “Oh, I don’t want to color my hair again. I don’t want to do any more tattoos. I don’t want to just wear a T-shirt and baggy pants. What's the next move?”