![]() ![]() “Lye,” built on a chipper horn loop, invokes the scene in The Autobiography of Malcolm X where X first gets his hair conked. Throughout the album, his lyrics evoke eruption and heat, images that cast his cryptic revelations as both painful and cleansing. “Fire leaping up out the hole/Deep breathing only make it grow,” he deadpans on “Fire in the Hole,” unfazed by the flame. “Foot shook ground when I stepped on it/I didn’t look back when I broke soil/‘Cause every time I did it would hurt more,” he raps on “2010,” one of many moments where he interrogates the past to reaffirm his commitment to the future. Thematically, he focuses on forward motion, frequently adopting imagery that melds the earthen and the bodily, the cosmic and personal. Earl remains an oddball writer who parachutes into ideas from peculiar, oblique angles. The trick to that self-assessment, of course, is that, fittingly, it’s also a misdirection. ” Leaving behind the corroded and abrasive soundscapes of previous releases gives him space to rap “straight, no frills,” as he puts it on “Titanic.” The beatmaking is instead delegated to longtime collaborators like the Alchemist, Black Noi$e, Samiyam, and Sage Elsesser (as Ancestors), all of whom provide conventional production with discernible drums and pristine samples rather than an “ Earl Sweatshirt-type beat. The album is mixed by vaunted Jay-Z engineer Young Guru, who renders the vocals crisp and clear, and Earl, a lover of murky, waterlogged sounds, notably has no production credits. It helps that his words are more sonically foregrounded compared with past releases. He’s constantly finding ways to play with words without trivializing them, a balance that has eluded many of rap’s preeminent lyricists in recent years. On “Vision,” he addresses the pandemic directly: “Everything we in the midst of/How long you waiving the rent?/Moratorium extendo/I’m just evading the pit,” he raps, his flow springing off Black Noi$e’s hypnotic piano loop. “Iceberg, MAC kinda slim/What they couldn’t see sink the ships/Capsize mean you’s a flip/Send a postcard from the depth,” he deadpans, zeroing in on the Titanic as a disaster parable, yet remaining wry. The single “Titanic” is almost trolling in its breezy free associations. A sense of artistic renewal guides his music as he navigates the pandemic world and its ambient horrors. Sick! is decidedly outward facing, the rapper breaching rather than tunneling. On previous albums, Earl treated music as a refuge where he could probe his aching psyche and voice his darkest emotions. It felt political, like a mayoral campaign.” That hesitance, plus planned tracks being lost in some sort of computer snafu, seems to have pushed him toward more urgency and directness, a reset that reorients the mechanics of his songs. “The album I was working on before had a really optimistic energy towards it, but it felt gross. “I was rapping, rapping, on every single song,” he said in an interview. Sick! came together in the aftermath of another planned album falling apart due to the pandemic and Earl’s uneasiness with his writing becoming showy and mechanical. Sick! continues that trend, charting new territory for Earl while continuing to subtly dissect rap conventions. His elliptic, woozy songwriting, crammed with texture and motion, yet shunning structure and cogency, subverted ideas about how rap songs could sound and be arranged. But on 2018’s Some Rap Songs and 2019’s Feet of Clay, he directly pushed against notions of rap greatness as merely the sum of one’s verbiage, embracing the clipped rhythms and nonlinearity of the hip-hop margins. On his first two albums, those revisions were muted, taking place mostly on the level of subject matter and sound. His response to listeners seeking replays of his 2010 mixtape Earl, which introduced him as a devilish lyrical wunderkind, has been relentless reinvention. But rather than coast on that deification, the California rapper (whose real name is Thebe Kgositsile) has spent his career defying expectations. ![]() For a certain strain of rap fan, Earl Sweatshirt’s elite lyricism has made him a god among men. ![]()
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