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I knew instinctively that Bladee would understand this; if you had to cram into two words what I’ve been saying, you’d have a hard time doing better than “Reality Surf.” (“Put a concept on that feeling/Take a word and change the meaning,” he chirped on that song from 2020, which sounds about right.) It tracks, then, that the sense I got last year that Bladee had gone from cult figure to actual celebrity (the Pop Crave of it all) corresponded with the redirected winds of fate also known as vibe shifts. People have tossed that term about the past few years, but it wasn’t until 2024 that you could really feel it—an almost chemical change in the air, affecting how music sounded, how we spoke, what made sense. You could interpret the shift in all kinds of different ways, but the word that lingers in my head is “post-reality.”At Bladee’s apartment, I broached the subject of the vibe shift, explaining that I was trying to express its cultural implications more precisely. “I feel like it’s something where people got more spiritual,” he offered. “People talk about vibes, people like the frequencies, and I think people are more open to spiritual, weird stuff.” He’d been having similar conversations with his friends, wondering what would come of our increasingly uncanny world, though he held onto the hope that the preponderance of AI would result in something good, or at least something new.I mentioned the word I kept returning to: post-reality. “At least in America, it feels like nobody believes in anything,” I went on. “Everything seems kind of fake—the news, an image, a voice.”“But then it becomes important—what is actually real,” Bladee replied excitedly, turning the topic to the role of intuition. “You have to be able to sense this realness. I think that’s what’s cool—it’s forcing people to reconnect with what is a vibe. It kind of proves what has a soul, and what is a soul. Because there’s something that’s soul-less.”In every other cover story I have written, the artist I am profiling has been promoting something: a new record, a brand, or some noteworthy life change. I like that in this one, Bladee isn’t. It’s a snapshot of an artist at a moment in time—an interesting moment, as they all tend to be lately.What I’m listening to:
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