Earl Sweatshirt’s fifth studio album, Live Laugh Love, is a riff on the formula the rapper has been tweaking over the course of his last few releases. It’s laidback, vibe-y, and sample-heavy, with cryptic, free-associative lyrics that, clipped to short lengths, ring like mantras.
Live Laugh Love’s songs, most of which clock in at under two minutes, consist of a loop that more or less fades in and out. There are no great surges in volume or moments of stillness, and there are few traditional choruses. The beats have a quality approaching lounge music, making for a quiet, engrossing listen—a song cycle that puts you in a kind of trance.
Earl has a relaxed, gently rhythmic flow and a reedy, adenoidal voice that’s melodic and monotonal. He rhymes mostly in shorthand and sentence fragments, making even his most complex, intricate lyrics sound effortless. “My wingspan is the globe,” he says before an abrupt beat-switch on the standout track “Live.” Yet he can still dole out top-shelf punchlines, as he does on “Static”: “Geeked off it, stockpiling drip, I’m putting shit on like Steve Harvey.”
Live Laugh Love shows little variation in terms of Earl’s overall sound, but it demonstrates an evolution of the lyrical themes of grief and doubt that he’s been exploring since his 2013 breakthrough Doris. While 2018’s Some Rap Songs and its 2019 follow-up EP, Feet of Clay, were both profoundly pessimistic works, Live Laugh Love sees him reimagined as a benevolent, hopeful, if slightly withdrawn, figure. And he sounds right at home.
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