As you might guess from the name, Yung Bae is a musical guilty pleasure. For the past several years, the Los Angeles-based producer has steadily released funky, sample-heavy disco tracks, complete with anime artwork and names like “…so i wrote her this song and we drank monster and watched adventure time” and “she said yes and i danced in the snow.” It’s the type of music you slyly hit play on while shoving your phone in your pocket so the person next to you on the bus won’t question your taste.
Of course, the person next to you on the bus probably doesn’t know just how good Yung Bae’s music is.
Bae 2 is Yung Bae’s recently released second full-length album, the follow-up to his 2014 debut Bae. It’s also the producer’s first release under the Yung Bae moniker since spending part of last year making music under his real name, Dallas Cotton. While the songs put out under that project — including remixes of EDM mainstays Kaskade and Pegboard Nerds — were clearly strides toward a more serious sound, they also lacked the pure “fun” factor that Yung Bae’s music brought to the already self-serious Soundcloud scene.
But on Bae 2, the music is all about being enjoyable, and the album is all the better for it. The brief album opener serves as a formula for the rest of the tracks: short, fast-paced songs of retro-sounding euphoria. There are almost no added sounds on the album: All Yung Bae and his collaborators use are brilliantly selected samples — largely from ’70s and ’80s soul, funk and disco — and heavy dance music drums that bring those samples into the 21st century.
Bae 2 is at its strongest when it nails that blend of old and new. Mid-album highlight “Party In Me” is a clever remix of soul drummer Gene Dunlap’s 1981 song of the same name and combines the full-band feel of the original with a sleek, modern future-funk sound. “Ain’t Nobody Like You” has a similarly tongue-in-cheek duality, blending an upbeat, funky disco sample and vocals from producer Josh Pan (singing the lyrics to Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me,” of course).
At just over 30 minutes, Bae 2 breezes by — none of the 12 tracks are longer than four minutes. But the short runtime plays to Yung Bae’s strengths. As a producer, he’s incredibly consistent, which is why there’s not a single song on the record that stands out as weaker than the others. The album’s briskness also ensures that Bae‘s reliance on a single sound remains a strength: Even if the songs never move beyond the constraints of his future-funk sound, the album moves so quickly that the style is hard to get sick of, even on repeated listens.
On songs like the hands-in-the-air dance floor stomper “Don’t Stop,” featuring fellow future-funk pioneer Flamingosis, and “Slam Jam!” — a collaboration with serial remixer Luca Lush — the truly strange roots of Yung Bae’s music come into focus. His songs mine emotion (namely euphoria) from nostalgia, especially for the ’80s, an era neither Yung Bae nor most of his listeners were alive for. It’s the type of nostalgia that could only exist on the Internet, and one that the producer takes full advantage of on his album. And that’s a good thing too, because with summer just weeks away, Yung Bae picked the perfect time to get his funk on.
