Sweatshirt finished 13 songs - including “Playing Possum,” which samples a recording of his mother speaking about him and audio of his father reading his poem “Anguish Longer Than Sorrow” - with the intention of springing them on his father by surprise, as a conciliatory gesture, but tragedy struck again when Keorapetse Kgositsile passed away in January, before Earl got a chance to send him the album. The 2016 loosie that fans called “Bad Acid,” which appears here as “December 24th,” is the earliest recording from the sessions. Work on the new music began not long after the last album. The new album serves compact, brass tacks rap, all hypnotic loops and life lessons, the kind of epiphanies that hit you when you’ve seen too much of the true human condition, in strength and in depravity. He’s fighting off bad vibes still - “Stuck in Trumpland watching subtlety decay,” as he says in “Veins” - but there’s renewed zeal for life and pride in pedigree. Lyrically, this is Earl Sweatshirt at his most optimistic. It’s informed by the wiry, impatient energy and crackling hiss of Doom and Madlib records, the loop wizardry of Dilla, the streetwise paranoia of Mobb Deep, and the wisdom of modern tristate-area torchbearers like Mach-Hommy, MIKE, Ka, and Roc Marciano. SRS bridges generations of whip-smart cold-weather hip-hop.
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I learned this in a series of conversations with the artist in the weeks prior to the reveal of album No. It’s a mistake to believe that any one snapshot of a person’s interests captures them fully, though. If you watched any of his scenes from Odd Future’s Adult Swim sketch series Loiter Squad, you know his humor and absurdism also come with keen comedic timing.
Like his friends and collaborators Vince Staples and Tyler, the Creator, Earl keeps a Twitter account that’s every bit as bitingly funny as his records are presumed to be suffocating and dark. This is apparent in his internet presence, which expresses both his great taste in music and his quick, incisive humor on a number of subjects. Earl might not seem constantly present, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t lurking. It’s work being on all the time anyone who tries gets a little warped under the heat of the light. When he’s Earl, he is a conduit for fans at shows, on records, and online. When he’s away, it’s Thebe mustering the spiritual and creative juice to be Earl again.
When Earl goes quiet between albums and tours, he’s switching the fame light off, reversing the dizzying shunt from seclusion to national notoriety he experienced at 18. There is cosmic irony in the younger Kgositsile’s use of intricate wordplay, the family profession, as his tool of rebellion. Music is a space for Earl to vent about his troubles. His major label debut, Doris, memorialized his grandmother, who passed away in 2013 2015’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside chronicled a hermetic period of recovery following a skateboarding accident that left the rapper and producer with a torn meniscus. An undercurrent of loss and pain trails all of his creative breakthroughs. Sweatshirt, born Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, son of South African poet Keorapetse “Bra Willie” Kgositsile and California law professor Cheryl Harris, has a right to be leery of the future. Over the years, the rage in his music has shifted from bloody, ultraviolent fantasy to real internal conflicts like depression and familial dysfunction, but the early mixtape’s cloud of impending doom remains. Time and counseling sanded Earl’s rough edges. For years, he was the teenage wunderkind you couldn’t see, a rap Golden Child hidden away in a Polynesian retreat for troubled youth as his crew, Odd Future, became the talk of the music industry, both for their deftness as rappers, singers, and producers and for the uncompromising crassness of their lyrical content. Ever since the first frames of the grainy body-horror video for the title track of his debut mixtape EARL, Earl Sweatshirt has felt both eerily ever-present and never present.
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