If you were looking for the exact opposite of a phrase like “Live Laugh Love,” it would be, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. Released 10 and a half years ago, Earl Sweatshirt’s melancholic sophomore album title is the anti-Annie — a bleakly abrupt way of saying, the sun won’t come out tomorrow, and even if it does, I’ll be too busy brooding and watching The Wire Season 4 to notice. The tracks themselves are similarly dire, with singles like “Grief” sounding like a bottomless pit where you can barely hear yourself scream. His latest LP, Live Laugh Love, is the sound of someone who’s long since found the resolve — and the wisdom — to climb out of it.

His first release since 2023’s flawless joint album with Alchemist, Voir Dire, Live Laugh Love finds Earl exploring his own thoughts with all of his customarily wry wit and ricocheting symbolism, with farm-to-table production framing his observations in rich, disorienting calm. Wielding his viscous baritone and mutant dexterity, he throws syllables like he’s playing catch with himself; the patterns can be unpredictable, but he finds his way to the rhymes like he knew the route all along. For “gsw vs sac,” he slinks around a psychedelic soul sample like a crafty thief tip-toeing between infrared lasers to snatch a prized jewel. On your iPhone notes app, some of these words barely rhyme, but Earl’s Slim Shadian understanding of phonetics and vowels and consonants make them feel like they all came prepackaged together: “What my nigga ‘Tay Hicks say?/ I just paint pictures, you just chip in on a frame/ Zoomin’ out of thick malaise in my cranium.”

Just as singular is Earl’s knack for associative thinking. With each release since I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, he’s drifted further from more linear rhyme patterns and straightforward wordplay; if he could see the shore before, he’s now in the middle of the ocean with folks like billy woods. The results are layered meanings that open up like secret tunnels to new understandings. Even when he’s just talking shit on tracks like “Forge.” “Jog my memory, what isn’t ours?/ Slivers of God ad infinitum/ I gather you didn’t hunt at all, we circling like hawks” is just a gorgeous way of saying, “I’m finna eat these rap niggas up.” Laced with imperial guzheng strings, it all feels like Thebiana Jones just discovered a hidden treasure in the mountains. Credit to Theravada, who supplies Earl with sounds that are, like Earl’s rap technique, as grand as they are understated.

While stereotypes about Earl’s style persist, he stopped being all doom-and-gloom a long time ago. But there are layers of guarded optimism here that feel new; at least half the svelte new album spills out with graceful life lessons that don’t feel didactic. It’s a comfort that makes more sense when you consider that he’s quit drinking and he’s now a father of two.

“I think [Live Laugh Love] captured both parts of myself: being 16 and then also having a family,” Earl told The New York Times’ Popcast in a new interview. “The 16-year-old that still is like, [grunts] “live, laugh, love — [expletive] dumbass!’ Like, ‘live laugh, love, the world is [expletive]!’ And then my life changing drastically. It’s like, I guess the joke was on me, because if you have kids, that is not even kind of funny at all. If someone says “live, laugh, love” and you have kids, you’re like, ‘Exactly, brother.‘”

It’s a fundamental irony that lives in the album title, but the phrase truly feels more instructive than ironic — more medicine for a recovering fatalist. On “Infatuation,” he invokes an iconic 300 one-liner to suggest the existence of a world where we don’t have to dine in hell. From there, an existential rumination on the nature of fate, and adaptation. “[We] flirt with danger, we hastily learn how to dance,” he raps, two-stepping without being afraid to look at his own feet.

COLD AS ICE

ROAST ME

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— Tam-A-ra (@T_gots2_haveit) August 20, 2025