You may have heard it — the signature lyric in Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO Tour Llif3”: “Push me to the edge / all my friends are dead”

Is there a better refrain to sum up the year so far?

“Mumble rap” — what some might call his approach — is the derisive, catch-all term for music made by young people with little regard for hip-hop dogmas like lyrical intricacy or attention to a beat.

But it’s often a misnomer, wielded too freely against hybrid singer-rappers that value melody (and, yes, style) over traditional rhyming. And what’s so wrong with a well-paced mumble anyway?

On “XO Tour Llif3,” the surprise Top 10 single, Lil Uzi Vert’s lyrics are sharp and vivid when he wants them to be, detailing a toxic, pill-fogged and not-quite monogamous relationship from within the crosswinds of a fight.

It’s the whiny, pop-punkish delivery of the choicest lines that helped make the song a crossover pop hit:

“I don’t really care if you crrryyy / On the real you should’ve never lied / Should’ve saw the way she looked me in my eyes / She said baby I am not afraid to die”

and

“Pleeease, Xanny, make it go away / I’m committed, not addicted, but it keep controlling me / All that pain, now I can’t feel it, I swear that it’s slowing me”

But the real, palpable angst is conveyed as the words decay.

At first, the hook is understated, and phrased as a warning:

“Push me to the edge / All my friends are dead / Push me to the edge / All my friends are dead / Push me to the edge / All my friends are dead / Push me to the edge”

But the track begins to bleed unease as Lil Uzi Vert reaches his higher vocal register and slurs increasingly dire threats like,

“She say I’m insane, yeah / I might blow my brain out”

By the time the chorus returns, his grasp on chill is long gone. The line becomes a deconstructed mess of vowel syllables tumbling forth as yelps of pain. The words are no longer intelligible, but anyone can sing along:

“All my friends are dead / All my friends are dead”

Fittingly, right after, Lil Uzi Vert is slightly more composed and bragging of artists who “want to take my cadence.”

The full hook returns a final time, with Uzi reverting back to his near-deadpan delivery, but it’s most pure in the mangled form — “all my friends are dead / all my friends are dead” — a sublime catharsis without a glimmer of hope.

It doesn’t get better: