Enforced audience participation is a wearisome staple of any hip-hop gig, but Earl Sweatshirt appears to be taking it rather more seriously than most. “Come on!” he hectors the crowd, bristling with dissatisfaction at the energy levels of their sing-along to Grown Ups. “Sing the damned song with some enthusiasm!”
It’s pleasing that Sweatshirt is such a tetchy ringmaster, as it’s entirely true to the baleful, restless agitation of his music. The 21-year-old LA rapper’s second album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, is a magnificent outpouring of adolescent angst delivered through a distorted production evocative of a stoner’s bleary, paranoid fug.
Such nuances are notoriously difficult to transfer to the live hip-hop arena, but backed only by his DJ and a languid hypeman, Nakel, Sweatshirt makes a decent fist of it. A gangling, rangy figure in sweats and a hoody, he plays the new album in full and in order, spitting out dense, witty, yet gnomic rhymes shot through with twitchy insecurity.
He has been compared to Kendrick Lamar, but where that rapper’s To Pimp a Butterfly looks to take the pulse of 21st-century America, Sweatshirt’s concerns are determinedly solipsistic. He mumbles of long, dark nights of a surly soul wasted on whisky and weed: the funereal doom-rap of Grief finds him “panicking a lot, scramblin’ for Xanax”.
The entire set is akin to eavesdropping on a brittle, brooding interior monologue that is alternately difficult to follow and obliquely menacing. After a high-energy encore cameo from London rapper Little Simz, Earl Sweatshirt gabbles over the honeyed beats of the closing Quest/Power and is gone inside 45 minutes. It has been invigorating, though, and quite long enough.
- At Wildlife 2015 festival, Brighton City Airport, on 7 June. Then touring.
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