Some Rap Songs is released

Why it matters

Some Rap Songs came out November 30, 2018, on Tan Cressida/Columbia. Earl Sweatshirt produced almost the entire album himself, under the production alias randomblackdude. The album is twenty-five minutes long, fifteen tracks, almost no chorus structures anywhere. It is one of the most deliberately abstract and emotionally raw rap projects of the late 2010s. Earl had been a public figure since his teenage years (he was in Odd Future before he was 17, was sent by his mother to a Samoan therapy school in 2010, came back to a Tyler-organized welcome that became its own Odd-Future legend). Some Rap Songs is the album he made when his father, the South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, died in early 2018. The album is structured as Earl's processing of that loss, recorded mostly alone, with samples chopped to the point of near-illegibility. The production lineage is direct from Madlib and J Dilla and Knxwledge; the writing is Earl's own dense, internal, often-mumbled register. You should hear it at low volume in a quiet room. It rewards careful listening. It refuses to do anything else.