Earl Sweatshirt : Live Laugh Love
Having a surprise illness hit as your editor nudges you, doped up on a mystifying combo of coffee and cold medicine and ginger tea and the brain fog from being sick in general, is maybe the ideal state to take in the new Earl Sweatshirt record Live Laugh Love. The cover signals a warmer affair than the paranoiac spidery verses before, a tone stretching back to the fittingly titled I Don’t Like Shit by our man. The production is avant-garde as always, a hazy mix of psychedelia and the kind of nostalgic mutating/melting that vaporwave took a shot at, done here to much greater effect. It plays like Common’s pre-racism-era Kanye produced Go on benzos, soul vocals melting like drooping tapers set to drums deep in pocket. Earl steps up his rapping here. while somewhere between youth and adulthood, he lost the spastic accuracy he used to possess in exchange for a laidback flow reminiscent of someone more like Ka or DOOM than Jadakiss, suddenly he seems active tense in his delivery again, at least for stretches like “Live” or opening cut “gsw vs sac”. It all seems to burgeon from the newfound joy he’s been mentioning recently.
His youth by now is modern rap legend, with his teenage prodigy work being soon eclipsed by his sudden disappearance to Africa and radio silence, all while his old crew in Odd Future grew up into mature artists their youth in its combativeness perhaps couldn’t anticipate. Earl came back with a complex set of emotions we saw over records like Doris and the aforementioned I Don’t Like Shit, balancing the love and tension he felt toward his parents, the way pressures as a teen prodigy can fuck you up, finding yourself while industries accumulate waiting to exploit your youthful work and naivety. He settled, unlike Tyler, always his strange foil, into a very backpacker-friendly classic underground hip-hop vibe. His acclaim in critical circles is perhaps not just a sign of his own quality in things like beat selection, penmanship and flow but also an obsessive continuous canonization of projects like Dr. Octagon, Cannibal Ox and Aesop Rock.
But that’s where the character work, like a great wrestling gimmick, comes in. Earl has his history, which offers the occasional flashes of teeth and knives over records like SICK! and last year’s VOIR DIRE with our fave over here The Alchemist, but also flashes of his literary and familial poetic acumen like his paraphrasing of Malcolm X’s autobiography in “Lye” discussing conking his hair or the joyful Biblical figures all over Feet of Clay. Here on Live Laugh Love, the joy shines through: he’s a new father, married just this year, on the other side of an often confusing if rousing youth. We see a level of vigor from Earl on cuts like “Static” that I don’t recall having heard since his earliest work; that he name checks Vince Staples, a fellow connoisseur of the 20-minute rap record, is fitting, especially given their respective turns to the joyful. “CRISCO” showcases tricksy rhymes, the kind that proved why he was always the awaited one in Odd Future, someone who clearly bars on bars behind the provocateurism of the group and a complex set of nested rhymes that makes any old writer tempted to pick up the pen themselves (and likely do worse).
But it’s hard for me not to compare this across the pond to Tyler. They’ve both become fine men, rapping from places of joy now rather than the shock and seeming rage of before. Tyler also dropped a superb short rap record this year, dialing back the conceptualism of his last few for, to quote Earl, some rap songs. And yet despite the constantly circling, the identities remain separate, complete: “TOURMALINE” with is deep-pocket laid back flow couldn’t be tapped by Tyler, would only make sense in Earl’s body of work, a sunny psychedelic soul lick to sit on a porch and watch your kid play to. And yet despite all this joy, this set feels like the most psychedelic and progressive yet in terms of its production, with tricks like the heady beat switch midway through the opening cut or the rapping-against-the-Benadryl sense coursing through “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!”. His non-sequiturs, often overly fixated upon in my view, are matched by production sympathetic to them, a half-programmatic turn that feels just right. I am not sure I’ve ever said something superlative about Earl; instead, his records are like well-loved old cuts you just remembered, like discovering a solid deep-cut soul-funk record in the stacks. This time is no different. It’s a well-earned pocket.
Label: Tan Cressida
Year: 2025
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Earl Sweatshirt : Live Laugh Love
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