Earl Sweatshirt - Some Rap Songs Review

The production on Some Rap Songs is built almost entirely by Earl himself, with contributions from Adé Hakim, Denmark, Black Noise, Sage Elsesser and Shamel of SOTC. The approach is sample-based, but the samples are treated less as loops than as material to be broken and reassembled, an approach that shares DNA with Madvillainy's fragmentary construction. Earl pulls from soul and jazz records, many of them obscure, and chops them into fragments that repeat at odd intervals, often with the dust and imperfections of the original vinyl left audible. The effect is claustrophobic and restless. Tracks feel like they are collapsing in on themselves, the loops stumbling over each other without settling into a groove. The low end is heavy and the mix is murky, with Earl's voice often sitting so far back that you have to strain to hear the words clearly.

This is a deliberate choice, not a mistake. The buried vocals create a sense of being submerged, of trying to speak from underneath something. The short track lengths reinforce the feeling that nothing fully resolves. Most songs are under two minutes, several are under ninety seconds, and a few barely reach a minute.

Earl rarely completes a full verse in the traditional sense. Instead he offers fragments: a couplet, a few bars, a melodic phrase that trails off. The writing is dense and elliptical, heavy on internal rhyme and slant rhyme, with lines that collapse multiple ideas into a single image. He layers assonance and consonance so tightly that verses feel like one long exhalation, the rhymes arriving in unexpected places.

The guest appearances are minimal and purposeful. Navy Blue appears on The Mint, his verse matching the album's low-key intensity, and Standing on the Corner contributes to Ontheway!, adding texture rather than a traditional feature verse. The most significant voices on the album, other than Earl's, are sampled: his mother Cheryl Harris speaking on Playing Possum, and his father Keorapetse Kgositsile reading poetry on the same track. The decision to build an album around these voices, particularly his father's, gives the record a clear emotional anchor. Earl is not just sampling old records; he is sampling his own inheritance, the music and words of the generation before him, and using them to process loss.

The weakness is accessibility. The production is so dense and the vocals are mixed so low that casual listening does not work, a challenge that Danny Brown - Atrocity Exhibition also embraced with its abrasive sonic approach. You have to meet the album on its terms, and those terms require attention and patience. For listeners expecting the clarity of Earl's earlier work, this will feel like a step backward.

The short track lengths also mean that individual songs do not develop. Ideas are introduced and abandoned, verses end abruptly, and the album moves on before a thought fully lands. This creates a fractured, dreamlike quality, but it also means that several tracks feel like sketches rather than finished songs.

The album plays as a continuous sequence, fifteen tracks in twenty-five minutes, and the pacing is relentless. There are no pauses, no breathing room, no moments where the album stops to explain itself. The effect is cumulative rather than episodic, similar to how Armand Hammer - Haram builds its oppressive atmosphere through unrelenting density. Individual tracks do not stand out as much as they contribute to a larger mood, a sense of being trapped inside a loop that keeps folding back on itself.

The opening stretch establishes the sound with three short, fragmented entries before moving into the first song that feels like a complete statement. The following track offers the most direct link to Earl's earlier style, before the album retreats into more abstract territory through the middle section.

The back half is even more fractured. Several entries last less than a minute or hover around ninety seconds, and one uses sampled voices from Earl's parents to create the album's emotional center without Earl saying much himself. The final entry is an instrumental that serves as a quiet ending rather than a climax. The album does not build to a peak; it simply stops, as if the process of working through grief does not have a satisfying conclusion.

The length is both a strength and a limitation. At twenty-five minutes, the album does not overstay its welcome, and the density of the production means there is more happening in each minute than on most longer records. But the brevity also means that some ideas feel underdeveloped. Certain entries are over almost before they start, and while this suits the album's aesthetic, it also means that the record can feel more like a statement of intent than a fully realized work. The album earns its length by refusing to pad itself, but it leaves you wanting more in a way that is not entirely intentional.

Some Rap Songs is Earl Sweatshirt at his most uncompromising. It ranks as his most experimental and personal work, a record that prioritizes emotional honesty over accessibility and atmosphere over clarity. It is not his most technically impressive album in terms of pure rapping, but it is his most cohesive as a piece of sound design, and the one where the production and the content are most tightly bound together. For listeners who value innovation and are willing to work for it, this is essential. For listeners who want Earl's wordplay delivered clearly over more traditional beats, this will be frustrating.

The album has aged well. The lo-fi, sample-heavy approach that felt uncommon in 2018 now sounds like it anticipated a broader shift toward more experimental, introspective rap. The decision to make something this raw and unpolished, released through a major label, looks bolder in hindsight. The album's influence is audible in the wave of abstract, grief-focused rap that followed, though few records have matched its combination of density and brevity. It is not an album that grows on you gradually; it either clicks or it does not, and the response tends to be immediate.

Start with Nowhere2go and December 24, the two tracks that offer the clearest entry points. If those work, play the album straight through without interruption; the sequencing is the point. Skip it if you need Earl's voice upfront in the mix or if you want traditional song structures. After this, try his earlier work to hear where he came from, or move to Navy Blue's solo material for a similar approach to lo-fi production and introspective writing, or explore MF DOOM - Operation: Doomsday for another take on dusty, sample-heavy hip-hop that values atmosphere over polish. Some Rap Songs is not an album that tries to please everyone, and that refusal to compromise is exactly why it matters.