![]() ![]() Honestly… more than usual it’s an odd vibe, where there’s a cleaner mix but the textures are no less present and ramshackle, where Earl shows more diversity in his flows but it all still locks into the same hazy baritone monotone. ![]() Hell, Armand Hammer is on the album as well as Zelooperz, who I’d also bucket in an analogous scene, and given that Armand Hammer had also been cleaning up their production their past two albums, when I heard that this might be one of Earl’s most accessible project since I Don’t Like Shit, I was genuinely curious how this might turn out… so what did we get? I’m not sure it really changes how I feel about his last projects - the grief and emotional throughline of Some Rap Songs places it in its own territory, and FEET OF CLAY was such a mess on the production side that it never fully clicked - but it did give me a rough idea where Earl Sweatshirt would be going with SICK!, his new album this year. Funnily enough I mentioned the parallel when I reviewed FEET OF CLAY in passing… and then Earl shows up on both Shrines and HARAM, and suddenly the context of where he wants to be is way more obvious. ![]() But by the time FEET OF CLAY was released in 2019, I was starting to get an inkling of the type of underground rap music Earl Sweatshirt was looking to make: the wordy, thorny, academically minded but still bruising hip-hop from acts like Armand Hammer and Mach-Hommy and even Quelle Chris, especially as he was thematically heading in this territory and was picking up more overlap in frequent guest stars and producers. To be fair, coming off the blurry, jazzy murk of Some Rap Songs, a lot of folks would not be immediately familiar with it, especially if they didn’t know artists like MIKE and the very lo-fi, blunt melancholy in that style of rap, even further accentuated by the powerful emotional undercurrents of that album. At some point, Earl Sweatshirt shifted his sound - and I think I only recently I caught up with where he wanted to be. ![]()
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