The Big Read - Juice Wrld: "The rap game is so motherfucking soft now"He went from unknown Illinois teen to Billboard-topping emo-rap icon in under a year, and his introspective, genre-mashing music draws on both Nirvana and Migos, offering up admirably honest rhymes about mental health, drugs and heartbreak. 20-year-old Juice WRLD, a self-proclaimed "old soul", Milf tells Jordan Bassett about his love of mid-noughties emo, his relationship with XXXTentacion, sharing royalties with Sting and disastrous shows with Nicki Minaj
Juice WRLD’s NME Big Read shoot is a family affair. In the plush basement of a central London hotel, his mum sitting a few feet away, tucking into a steak, the Chicago rapper’s joined by his girlfriend, Ally, who wraps herself around him, nodding sagely as he offers up bon mots on topics such as his eclectic influences ("I’m a music head and always will be") and the dignity in being an openly emotional man ("It’s ones of the toughest things in the world").
After our hour-long interview, still in ascending superstar mode, he poses for a quickfire photo shoot, appointing himself as creative director, telling the photographer where to stand while he goofs around, pretending to kick the camera with an expensive-looking sneaker.
No wonder he’s ebullient: he just released his second album, ‘Death Race For Love’, a sprawling 22-track emo-rap opus that swings between introspection (the sing-song ‘Robbery’) and braggadocio (from ‘The Bee Knees’: "’Holy shit! He’s the shit!’ - words from my peers"), laced with voguish trap beats and, more eccentrically, throwbacks to mid-noughties alt-rock. In the time it’s taken to turn this article around, ‘Death Race For Love’ has squealed to Number One on the Billboard 200, overtaking Ariana Grande and the soundtrack to A Star Is Born, having been acclaimed as potentially seminal within its subgenre.
Juice, aka Jarad Higgins, is 20 years old. Sometimes this is obvious, like when he recounts those eclectic influences, a comically broad collection of names that convey his coming of age in the streaming era: U2 and Queen merge with Weezer and Blink-182, who rub shoulders with Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane as Migos, Future and Travis Scott nip at their heels.
He’s spoken before about his love for Nirvana and Kurt Cobain - whom he cheekily name-checks on the ‘Death Race’ track ‘Rider’, dubbing himself the "codeine Cobain" - and explains today that he first heard comedian Weird Al Yankovic’s parody ‘Smells Like Nirvana’, which inspired him to seek the real thing. "The people I looked up to put their demons out there," Juice says of Cobain’s influence. "They provided a path for me to walk on."
There’s a confessional streak through ‘Death Race For Love’, Milf which, inkeeping with the lyrical style he’s cultivated since last year’s breakout break-up anthem ‘Lucid Dreams’, grapples with emotional turmoil, drugs (from opening track ‘Empty’: "I don’t know how to feel / Swallowing all these pills") and the quest to be a better man. It’s in the latter mould that NME finds him the most engaged, as he extols on his message that drugs are bad (though it’s worth noting that he delivers this sermon while slurping on so-called ‘Lister-lean’, a homemade concoction of Sprite he keeps topping up, alarmingly, with actual Listerine.