In his lyrics, he talked shit about girls and his favorite drugs - Xanax, weed, cocaine, “cheap liquor on ice” - and grappled openly with depression and anxiety. Peep’s music was often tagged as SoundCloud rap, though he was as much rocker as rapper, sampling his favorite bands (Modest Mouse, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Death Cab for Cutie) and singing over low-fi trap beats in an intoxicating seen-it-all voice. For a 21-year-old who’d only started posting his songs online two years earlier, it had been a head-spinning rise. The shows had been going well - most dates sold out, with mobs of kids trying to get close to Peep. Peep’s tour bus had already crossed North America twice in six weeks, and the Tucson show was to be the tour’s second-to-last stop.

“He was the guy who spoke for me, things I could never put into words,” Dowd says. Between him and the fans was a plastic table scattered with lighters, pens, rolling papers, scissors, ground-up bits of marijuana and a black sticker with the phrase alive + well on it.įor then-16-year-old Nick Dowd, a massive Peep fan who’d come to the venue with his friend Mariah Bons, sitting on the bus with Peep was a dream come true. In the back lounge, the AC was cranked, and Peep, wearing a black, studded vest and multicolored checkered pants, had folded his long, lean frame onto an upholstered seat. This was Tucson, Arizona, in November 2017, and the afternoon heat hovered in the mid-80s. They were smoking dabs, high-potency doses of concentrated weed that are vaporized, then inhaled. It was five hours before showtime and Lil Peep was in the back of his tour bus, getting high with two young fans.

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