The project is 22 songs long, reflecting pretty much all the finished material from the sessions. The entire Diamonds team reconvened in Los Angeles to mix the album. That cleared the way for the album to be finished, at long last. "It just brings back too many memories."īut in early 2023, Peep’s mother Liza won back control of her son’s music following a lawsuit settlement with his record label. "I didn’t even like listening to it," he says. My mom had to really help talk me back up."įollowing that debacle, Makonnen tried to put Diamonds out of his mind. "I was shaking and sweating and got sick for three days. "After that happened, I literally had a nervous breakdown," he says. Many of Makonnen’s other unreleased songs - he claims about 500 in total - were stolen by hackers as well. Makonnen recalls how it happened: People involved in the album got emails from someone claiming to be him, asking for its contents. In spring 2020, after conflicting reports about whether the album would ever be released, it leaked to the internet. That never happened, and after Peep’s death fans wondered about the fate of the album that he once proclaimed the best of the century. Makonnen and Peep split after London, with plans to reconvene and mix the album after their respective tours wound down. "I was telling Peep, you’re going to be like Frank Sinatra ," Makonnen says. Makonnen says he planned to perform some of the new tunes in a Vegas-style live act where he would play piano and a suit-clad Peep would sing. "So I was like, we need to give that same emotion, but make it sound a little happier and friendlier so that the listener can have that sense of celebration, crying, transformation - where this music is hitting me and allowing me to let things go, but also to uplift the things in my life that have been bearing down."Īs the record neared completion, Peep and Makonnen visualized what would come next: a joint tour, a merch line. "I was like, ‘And your songs sound very sad!’" Makonnen says, laughing at the memory. Peep had always loved Makonnen's songs with sad lyrics and happy-sounding music. There was a specific mission for the sound of the record as well. They addressed problems in their own lives, with hopes that fans would be able to relate. They typically began improvising melodies, while discussing what topics they wanted to talk about on each track. Throughout, Makonnen and Peep were dead-set on combining their styles. We were having so much fun and smiling and laughing the whole time." We were wearing each other’s clothes," Makonnen says. "We really lived together like best friends, if not more. The two artists were inseparable during the London sessions, staying in the same hotel and doing everything together. "That was the start of everything that bonded us together." "He said, ‘I feel like we can really make a change in the world by showing this because so many of us young fans and young people are dealing with all types of things,’" Makonnen remembers. Makonnen recalls that Peep felt two openly queer artists teaming up could make a huge impact on their young fanbases. Somewhere in the middle of this process, Peep came out as bisexual. The duo decamped to somewhere quieter, and brought a few trusted collaborators to Eastcote Studios in London. "It’s just too much going on, to where me and Lil Peep can’t focus." knows where we’re at and everybody’s pulling up to the studio and wants to get on the song," Makonnen recalls. They began sessions in July 2017 in Los Angeles, but getting work done proved difficult. The two already had business ties - Makonnen's manager at the time was business partner’s with Peep’s manager - so doing an album together seemed like the natural next step. And then we got to start talking to each other more, and we would be on the phone all day." "We became best friends as soon as we met.
The artists met at a mutual friend's house and "really hit it off,"Makonnen explains. I want to meet you.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I'm in L.A. "I came out as gay in 2017, in January, and Lil Peep was one of the first people to reach out to me and tell me, ‘Thank you. (Just weeks later, he would be proclaimed "the future of emo" by Pitchfork.) It took Makonnen making a dramatic announcement for the two to finally connect. Peep was at that point a popular, if still somewhat underground, emo rap star. People would tell us, 'oh, you should check out this guy.'"
"I was looking online and saw some of videos, and I thought that he was really intriguing and cool," Makonnen remembers.
But his association with Drake’s OVO label, which started in the wake of "Tuesday," had ended and he was searching for something new. Makonnen was at that point best known for his 2014 hit song "Tuesday," which benefited from a viral Drake remix. Makonnen first became aware of Lil Peep towards the end of 2016.
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