Earl Sweatshirt Details New Album, Drops Lurching ‘Grief’
Earl Sweatshirt channels his inner Charlie Brown on “Grief,” a new track from the rapper’s upcoming second album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, which he announced just a week of its scheduled March 23rd arrival date, Pitchfork reports.
“Grief” finds the Odd Future rapper navigating familiar themes of isolation and anxiety, and comes with a stark clip shot in X-ray-like vision. The video opens with Earl smoking alone on his couch spitting, “Good grief — I’ve been reaping what sewed / Nigga I ain’t been outside in a minute, I’ve been living what I wrote.” As he moves aimlessly through various scenes, Earl interweaves distrust and paranoia with braggadocio over lurching production; and while the MC retains his knack for building breathless piles of syllables and rhymes, he’s honed his marble-mouthed flow into something far sharper.
I Don’t Like Shit is currently available for pre-order on iTunes, while “Grief” is also available as a single. The album will feature guest appearances from Vince Staples, Wiki of New York collective Ratking, Dash and Na’kel. A full track list is below.
Following the announcement of I Don’t Like Shit, Earl took to Twitter to deliver what seemed to be an all-caps invective against his parent label, Sony Music, for messing up the album’s release. However, it looks like he was only poking fun at Top Dawg Entertainment CEO, Anthony Tiffith, who blasted Interscope after Kendrick Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, arrived ahead of schedule.
I Don’t Like Shit follows Earl’s 2013 effort, Doris, the highly-anticipated follow up to his beloved, self-titled 2010 mixtape. In the year or so after that tape’s release, as Odd Future helped ignite a new era for hip-hop on the Internet, Earl was a student at the Coral Reef Academy in Samoa, where he had little time to write or record. The absent Earl’s infamy grew alongside Odd Future’s popularity, and in 2012 he made his triumphant return, first joining the collective on their posse cut, “Oldie.” Earl went on to ink a deal with Columbia Records to start his own imprint label, Tan Cressida.
I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside track list
1. “Huey”
2. “Mantra”
3. “Faucet”
4. “Grief”
5. “Off Top”
6. “Grown Ups” (ft. Dash)
7. “AM // Radio” (ft. Wiki)
8. “Inside”
9. “Dna” (ft. Na’kel)
10. “Wool” (ft. Vince Staples)