Earl Sweatshirt, on Thursday night, released Feet of Clay, the Los Angeles rapper’s new seven-song project, and his second release in less than a year, following last November’s Some Rap Songs. Both projects present a sonic and thematic shake-up for the young artist. He’s traded in the neat piano and 808 loops of his past for fizzing, stilted soul and jazz samples, swapping out those dense, metered bars for a blistering free verse attack. On both of these projects, there’s lightness and weariness to him, both spry vitality and also languor. He sounds older.
It took some time for the rapper, born Thebe Kgositsile, to get here. Now 25, Earl spent much of the first half of his 20s writhing his way out from under the enormous shadow cast by his initial rise. It feels so long ago that it can be easy to forget, but back in 2011, Earl Sweatshirt was a bonafide international teen folk hero. As the enigmatic, lyrical wunderkind of Odd Future, he endured a level of public attention, adoration, and scrutiny that most don’t survive. It’s an experience that has led Kgositsile, in recent years, to describe himself as a “surviving child star.”
His debut, 2013’s Doris, felt like a fitting capstone for that era, a feature-laden major label affair with standout contributions from his Odd Future family as well as a few new famous friends he’d made along the way. The 2015 follow-up was a decidedly depressive, introverted turn. Titled I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, it’s a portrait of an artist in retreat, rejecting the expectations of the many eyes cast upon him, wrestling with the consequences of new-found adulthood, and struggling to be happy. But with last year’s Some Rap Songs, Earl seemed to emerge from the fog bruised and baggy-eyed, but wiser-seeming, with his chest held a little higher. It’s an album on which he confronts the death of his estranged father—the famed South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, with whom he was never able to reconnect—and revisits the depths of his depression with a staid firmness.
Feet of Clay is another revelation. With its name taken from the eschatological Book of Daniel, Earl describes the project as “a collection of observations and feelings recorded during the death throes of a crumbling empire.” This description is solemn and apt. Most of Feet of Clay’s brief 15 minutes feels as if the rapper has invited you to flip through his journal, but only if you do so at warp speed. Stray thoughts—big and small, trivial and existential— whiz by, hanging in your ear just long enough to spark a reaction, but too quick to really hold. It’s like trying to catch sand. “My soul and my heart / All in it, keep fishing / Gone, the macabre finish / And miss my Pop dukes, might just hit me / Depending how I play my cards,” he raps on “EAST,” an innervating sketch over a looped accordion sample. Observations about family, the country, and his Tsubi jeans pile onto one another like emotional bricolage.
This new, rejuvenated Earl Sweatshirt sounds clear-eyed and empowered. “Cognitive dissonance shattered and the necessary venom restored” he proclaims later on “EAST.” However, just as he seems to be righting the ship within himself, more questions about the stability of the world around him rear their head. On the next line, he wonders aloud, “As if it matters if you think it matters anymore / ‘Cause shit be happening with quick results / They couldn’t fathom all the damage that had to get done / Piglets in a barrel, we cookin’ up.” The good and the bad, joyous and cataclysmic fired at you in rapid succession. It sounds a lot like now.
