After over three years since his last project, Earl Sweatshirt releases his new abum SICK!. Made famous from Odd Future fame, Earl Sweatshirt has since found an audience more attracted to his mature, soulful lyrics, an audience that has grown up with him as he’s grown up. Nearly a decade since his first studio album Doris, and now 12 years since his shocking foundational tape Earl, Sweatshirt has evolved enormously as an artist in a manner that makes him nearly unrecognisable to his former self. Listen to SICK! below:

His last album, Some Rap Songs, treated the art of album-making with a jokey irreverance, though that project was much more than just some rap songs. They were frank unpackings of his mental health, his emotional states, and his history; briefly put, those rap songs were viewfinders into his soul. Few details were spared in a seamless project that meandered from one track to the next. In fact, he wanted the project to be released as one 26-minute track, but the label didn’t let him.

SICK! follows in a similar pattern. Where Doris was Earl trying to assert himself through Odd Future sensibilities, and I Don’t Like Shit I Don’t Go Outside was his escape from one confine (Odd Future) into another (inside), Some Rap Songs and SICK! represent Earl finding a new freedom. While still very much a depressive individual, he has found freedom in acceptance, in not fighting against his demons but sitting around and passing them backwoods.

While his prior albums tried to uphold his status as a lyric wordsmith, one of the best in the game at the time, Some Rap Songs and now SICK! don’t pack in the rhymes but instead find soulfulness in deliberate and selective word choice. Much of these lyrics sound like real poetry: “Callin’ out for Lord, lookin’ low and high / Finally found it at the core of my dimming fire / What’s a little lie? What’s a little lie?” A far cry from the unabashed misogyny of his early albums that he has been spending all of his adult life trying to distance himself from, Earl has spent the last half-a-decade withdrawing into himself. We are lucky to be treated with what he find and drags out for us in there.

SICK! is slightly more heavy on features than his previous project, with Zeelooperz and Armand Hammer taking up significant time on their two respective tracks. However, it still feels like a solo project with his individuality asserted in every bar. Earl Sweatshirt, real name Thebe Kgositsile, impresses once more.