Earl Sweatshirt On Resentment, Growth And Giving Yourself A Chance

Earl Sweatshirt has a lot to process. The Los Angeles rapper has just returned from a three-year break to release his third studio album, Some Rap Songs, last month and he's been taking it all in. All across downtown LA, promo posters of the album read: 'Thebe Kgositsile, professionally known as Earl Sweatshirt, presents the studio album Some Rap Songs.'

"My favorite part about this s*** is my whole name, and then differentiating Earl Sweatshirt as a PKA," the artist says. "Because this [album] is the most involved fusion dance between my actual self and just this other thing."

Earl, born Thebe Kgositsile, has spent years being a topic of hip-hop discussion. First, he was the MySpace Music diamond in the rough and the lyrical miracle of Odd Future who got plucked from his crew and sent away to boarding school in Samoa as a teenager. Then, he was the polymath the who marked his triumphant return with two gritty, critically-acclaimed albums — 2013's Doris and 2015's I Don't Like S***, I Don't Go Outside: An Album by Earl Sweatshirt. And more recently, he's become a recluse, only popping up in production credits or on festival stages every so often. But all the while, the 24-year-old has felt more hailed and commodified than actually understood.

Like the promo poster implies, is a fusion of a few different things. It's the soundtrack to his grief, as this is his first album to be released in the wake of the death of his father, South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, this past January. And at 15 songs, each less than three minutes long, it's a study in scaled-back simplicity, a departure from what fans have come to expect from him. "N****s be victims of overwriting, bro. You can hear when it switches from the heart to the head," Earl says.