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Lil Peep’s Acoustic “Walk Away as the Door Slams” Gets Straight to the Heart of His Appeal

Everybody’s Everything, the new posthumous compilation from Lil Peep, is not a great album. Conceived as a companion to the new documentary of the same name, it features a host of “new” tracks, along with a few that were previously only available unofficially via Soundcloud and low-quality YouTube rips. It has its moments—the ambling strums of Bighead’s “Liar” instrumental make for a decent opener, and the new take on “I’ve Been Waiting” with iLoveMakonnen is a noticeable improvement over the Fall Out Boy version. Mostly, though, these are just sketches, glimmers of what could have been, for one of the most innovative young rappers of the decade.

The major plus side to the apparent cash-grab mentality behind this release is that several songs from Peep’s old mixtapes have been made available to stream for the first time. “ghost boy” sounds as good as it did in 2015, and “white tee,” “cobain,” and “witchblades” all make welcome appearances.

The surprise highlight of these rereleased mixtape-era tracks is an acoustic version of “Walk Away As the Door Slams,” off 2016’s Hellboy, which manages to reframe the original without cheapening it. Spare, urgent guitar crystalizes the track’s connections to second- and third-wave emo, and lends an air of desperation to its titular refrain. “I just wanted to help, now I’m going to hell,” pleads Peep, his voice—cracks and all—laid newly bare.

Lil Tracy’s verse remains hilarious, its levity acting as a balm after the roughness of the track’s first half. “Yeah, I know you wanna FaceTime, baby, I have Samsung,” he sings, before dropping one of his all-time greatest lines: “When I met your mom, she told me I was handsome.”

While the Everything’s Everything companion album probably won’t add much to Peep’s legacy, the acoustic “Walk Away As the Door Slams” is a reminder of why it was always so easy to appreciate him in the first place. Singing about his own pain, he tapped into something universal. When the production is stripped away, what’s left is that voice, with all its hurt, and all its hope. Hear it below, and read SPIN’s interview with the directors of Everybody’s Everything here.