“I just really didn’t get it, and I think it’s just because I’m old, honestly. “OMFG” was the third time that Nedarb sampled Washington folk band The Microphones for a Peep track, the other two being “White Wine” and “Beamer Boy.” Like several of the established artists whose music was getting flipped in this unexpected way, frontman Phil Elverum was taken aback at first. “He’s basically saying, ‘No matter how big I get, that’s not gonna help anything with my mental health.’” “I would say a lot of us probably felt that way,” he says. When Peep’s music began attracting mainstream attention, it was a line from “OMFG” that people seemed to gravitate to: “I used to wanna kill myself / Came up still wanna kill myself.” The bars resonated with Nedarb because he felt like Peep was speaking for all of them in the Skid Row loft, who were learning that professional success can’t do much to cure anxiety and depression. In the midst of working on Hellboy, Peep’s new management wanted him to leave the loft, and got him his own apartment in Echo Park, where he struggled with feelings of isolation. “Motorola phone, I ain't goin' home / I won't go to work, mama hate me and I know it though,” he sings on the hook. On “Drive By,” we can feel the stress of Peep being far from his family, grappling with a new environment without his usual support system. The result was a deviation from the Hellboy formula, with angelic synths that sound more like Clams Casino cloud rap than emo trap. Today sampling Stranger Things would be cliched, but that wasn’t the case when producer Nedarb did it for “Drive By” just three days after the show was released. Can this be him, this Hellboy?” a voice asks. The final addition to the song was a sample Peep pulled from Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron, a short snippet that positions Peep as a true protagonist: “Can this be him? The one I have waited centuries to see? How strange, so far from his path that I barely see the promise of glory.

It was us always going through YouTube and listening to old emo bands and chopping them up to see what they’d sound like as a beat,” says Cortex, who also lived with Peep and Smokeasac at the time. “We were all sampling old emo bands we liked. The brooding Underoath sample was inspired by another Smokeasac and Yung Cortex co-production, “Sex. One morning, Smokeasac was awoken by Peep banging pots and pans above his head, and 20 minutes later, the exhausted producer had made the beat for what would become Hellboy’s title track. To commemorate one of the most influential mixtapes of the 2010s, GQ spoke to Peep’s family, friends, and collaborators about the making of each song on Hellboy.

It remains Peep’s most cohesive project, and serves as a poignant time capsule of the stretch just before the then-19 year old became an ascendant mainstream hip-hop star, only to die from a drug overdose in 2017. Today, Hellboy is being released on streaming services, a somewhat herculean feat given the breadth of samples that needed to be cleared. He said that people would judge him off the way he looked, when he really just wanted to help people out,” says producer Smokeasac, who lived with Peep and a handful of other producers at the Skid Row loft where they made much of the seminal 2016 mixtape Hellboy. “He told me that he saw parts of himself in the character Hellboy. As a heavily tattooed, polarizing underground rapper, the sweet-tempered introvert felt a growing chasm between how he was portrayed and who he was, similar to the way the Mike Mignola superhero’s looks inspire fear even though he just wants to help. He’d loved Hellboy since he was a kid, and felt a kinship with him. In retrospect, it’s obvious why Lil Peep gravitated to a comic book character who has the appearance of a villain and the soul of a hero.

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