Like many musicians who first come to success as teenagers, Earl Sweatshirt has done a lot of growing up in public. But unlike many of his peers, he has spent the years following his sudden and wild emergence as an internet sensation in the early 2010s mostly downsizing and recalibrating.
“So much was feeling outside of my control for so long,” he said in an interview this week on Popcast, the New York Times music show.
The first breakout star of Los Angeles’s Odd Future collective — which rapidly remade the hip-hop internet and birthed budding stars like Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean — Earl Sweatshirt, now 31, spent a significant portion of the group’s ascent away from the spotlight. He was at a boarding school in Samoa, sent there by his mother, who had been worried about his extreme on-record persona and his off-record attitude. The rapper, born Thebe Kgositsile, was a phenomenon, and his mysterious absence only increased fans’ interest.
His return was heralded, but he almost immediately took a different path from his crewmates. Often, Earl has appeared to be hiding in plain view, an accidental superstar trying to stay grounded. Over the past decade, he’s been one of the most visible makers of lo-fi, subterranean, lyrically abstruse rap music, a style that has both earned him a fervent following of connoisseurs and kept casual peekers at bay.
On Friday, he releases “Live, Laugh, Love,” his fifth full-length album on a major label — and first as a father of two, a toddler and a newborn. “This project, for sure, is the first time where I’ve looked left, right, and been like, I can do what I want to do,” he said. After crash-landing into the spotlight, he’s been inching his way out of it — and toward familial stability — one muddily intricate and knotty song at a time.
These are edited excerpts from the Popcast interview, which can be watched or listened to in full below.
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The post Earl Sweatshirt Turned the Hype Down. Now He Can ‘Live, Laugh, Love.’ appeared first on New York Times.
