Earl Sweatshirt first emerged rapping crass “jokes” from a salon chair in his breakout 2010 song “EARL”; by the end of the decade, he was practically unrecognizable.
His raps would morph into a slow-churning stream-of-consciousness, no longer employing the noodly flows and brashness of the 2010 mixtape Earl, and the beats curdled into cold, stiff loops that groaned beneath the weight of his angst.
Despite the drastic change in aesthetic, the core of Earl’s music, a love of wordplay and dense poetic phrasing, remained in plain sight.
When he’s at his most emotionally distant on Some Rap Songs and Feet of Clay, you could still hear the more thoughtful and angst-ridden Earl that popped up on Doris.
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