Newly released on streaming for the first time, these songs capture the instinctive way their voices blend and break over each other. castles and CASTLES II, the pair of mixtapes Peep and Tracy put out on SoundCloud five years ago, are time capsules for their collaboration. The posthumous Peep projects that have trickled out since then have been gifts to fans, shrapnels of his legacy. The two collaborated for a too-brief period, culminating in a bitter, public fall-out over Peep’s management and the way the media-and sometimes Peep himself-erased Tracy from the narrative around Gothboiclique and the rise of so-called “emo-rap.” They were barely speaking in 2017 when Peep died on a tour bus in Tucson, Arizona. Tracy said later he had never connected like that with anyone. Peep told Tracy he had a verse open for him, and the song they recorded that day is a frenetic collision, excavating a tender beat from a Postal Service song and frothing over it with half-sung raps about switchblades and taking a girl home to “connect like WiFi.” It’s close to perfect. Five minutes after Lil Peep and Lil Tracy met, they hatched plans to make music together.
