The launch party for Earl Sweatshirt’s sixth album was, by all accounts, a confounding affair. Some attenders came away convinced that Live Laugh Love contained guest appearances not merely by Vince Staples, but actor/rapper Donald Glover and comedian Dave Chappelle (it doesn’t, although all three contributed to a fanzine produced for the event). At one juncture, the DJ announced the arrival of “my brother, Earl Sweatshirt” before the appearance of someone who was visibly not Earl Sweatshirt – he was Asian, and apparently goes under the winning stage name Gary Underpants – performing a succession of Earl Sweatshirt songs. In the aftermath, at least one online music title didn’t seem sure whether it actually was a launch party for a new album or “an elaborate prank”: would a man whose grim worldview seemed summed up by the title of 2015’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside really release something called Live Laugh Love?
Of course, Earl Sweatshirt has form when it comes to confounding album launches: Sweatshirt’s last album, 2023’s Voir Dire, was secretly available on YouTube under a fake name for at least three years before it was officially released, according to its producer the Alchemist. And more broadly, this kind of thing fits with Earl Sweatshirt’s idiosyncratic approach to his career.
On arrival, he was widely held to be the most gifted rapper in the Odd Future collective: not even the furore about the stomach-churning lyrical content of his debut mixtape Earl (variously compared to a body horror film and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho) could quite drown out the technical skill and clarity on display. But while his bandmate Tyler, the Creator parlayed Odd Future’s early notoriety into a deserved seat at hip-hop’s high table, Sweatshirt seemed intent on taking a more inscrutable musical path. His lyrical focus shifted into self-examination of a particularly bleak tenor, the precision of his early flow loosened, the music behind him became increasingly challenging and avant garde: 2018’s Some Rap Songs ended Sweatshirt’s career at major label Columbia in a lo-fi squall of jagged samples, glitching beats, tape hiss and buried vocals.
Like Voir Dire, which paired him with a producer squarely from the old-fashioned, crate-digging school, Live Laugh Love isn’t as out there as some of Sweatshirt’s oeuvre. There are hooks, or at least samples that dig into your brain as they repeat – a harpsichord motif that sounds like it was swiped from an old film soundtrack or easy listening album on Forge; Exhaust’s maddeningly familiar but unplaceable soul vocal – while Sweatshirt’s voice is front and centre in the mix.
If the lyrics remain oblique, it’s hard not to notice a certain leavening in the overall mood – “Everybody love the sunshine / Shine like the boy Roy Ayers say / Can’t throw away my whole life standing in shade,” he raps on Gamma – that seems to be linked to new fatherhood. “Both my ears are ringing with your love,” he half raps, half sings on Tourmaline, a paean to his baby daughter set to a beautiful, cascading loop of strings, albeit one regularly disrupted by distorted yells and coughs.
Sunnier in outlook or not, you’re aware from the album’s start that this is music from deep within what some people call hip-hop’s “otherground”, an area in which normal rules don’t apply. On opener GSW vs Sac, both its impassioned female vocal and its rap – loose enough to feel like a freestyle – sound like they’re in danger of falling out of step with the beat; the rap gives way to a barked conversation and then the whole thing slumps abruptly to a halt inside two minutes. Tracks unexpectedly short out or crash into each other. Live’s bright-hued synth backing suddenly starts glitching midway through the track, the beat stuttering, the rhythm of Sweatshirt’s rhymes completely changing.
But if you give yourself over to the album’s weird logic, it’s an enrapturing way to spend 25 minutes. The disorientating shifts and non-sequiturs feel like observing a dream someone else is having, as on Crisco’s head-spinning melding of relentless rap against a backdrop of choral vocal samples manipulated so they appear to be slipping and sliding around your ears. Live Laugh Love is the sound of someone who got an early glimpse of what huge success might look like – packed off by his mum to a correctional academy in the wake of Earl’s release, he was the subject of both a “Free Earl” campaign and a lot of intrusive interest in his personal life – and decided to inhabit his own peculiar world instead, confounding album launches, abstruse music and unexpected appearances by Gary Underpants and all. You wouldn’t necessarily want to live there full time, but if you are inclined to visit, the scenery is dazzling.
This week Alexis listened to
Steve Lacy – Nice Shoes
Lacy has talked about his first single since 2022 as a “new language”: certainly, its combination of rave breakbeat, sprechstsang vocals, lo-fi soul and squalls of rock guitar sounds thrillingly different.
