Review: Earl Sweatshirt unwinds on Live Laugh Love

The generation-defining rapper tries on contentment and presence on his fifth studio album.

Depending on your perspective, the Eight of Cups symbolizes walking away or walking towards, the end of one way of life and the beginning of another. For Earl Sweatshirt, the tarot card’s meaning on “CRISCO” is decidedly more earthly: his son just took a shit. These immediate, mundane concerns underpin Earl’s fifth studio album Live Laugh Love, a placid record primarily concerned with the rapper’s domestic life. If his past records were marked by anger – directed outward as caustic jabs and political credos, curdled inward as sorrow and anxiety – his latest feels animated by discipline and higher purpose. On the album’s third-to-last verse, Earl recounts dreaming, years ago, of his newborn son crawling on the ceiling, “and I had never seent him.” Fast-forward and Live Laugh Love is happy to be dutifully present in the moment.

On the surface, not much has changed. Earl’s still unfurling woozy, run-on cadences over buoyant instrumentals that draw melodic inspiration from funk, boom-bap, and soul; his raps still tend towards assonant runs that hook unwieldy lines to your memory, as in, “I’m on my off-foot again, I pick apart the defense, with the triple cross.” Lyrically, the oblique flexes and threats of “Static” or “WELL DONE!” (“bear cubs, head hunt, voila, they probably do it for breadcrumbs”) are of a piece with the thinly veiled contempt in past songs like “4N” or “Hive.” As on previous projects, sharper-edged tracks here are counterbalanced by humble, introspective cuts about love and growth (“TOURMALINE,” “Live”).

Earl’s fraught career beginnings — his exile to a Samoan boarding school during Odd Future’s peak and the ensuing “Free Earl” campaign he would disavow – have led to an understandable distaste for celebrity. But even his earliest, most vile music kept his beating heart on its sleeve, a thread that’s continued as his subject matter has grown headier. Whether writing to find balance and doing “what I have to with the fragments” (2022’s “Tabula Rasa”) or sketching out the emotional strain of his childhood and instant fame on “Chum” (“Supposed to be grateful right? / Like ‘thanks so much, you made my life harder,’” he sneered at Complex upon his return to Samoa), his most vulnerable raps often prioritized telling over showing, determined to reclaim the narrative from listeners’ projections. And while a lesser lyricist might have come off patronizing or pandering, Earl’s intricate syntax and raw emotions kept his direct addresses from slipping into overtly cheesy territory.

Where past albums played on the tension between Earl’s plain-spoken feelings and the abstract imagery undergirding his dense flows, Live Laugh Love is lax and languid. He’s still prone to shoehorn in a rabbit hole-worthy allusion (“let it sing sing on ya like a Voice from East Harlem”) or toss off an extended metaphor like, “Flying in on the wide eye of the maelstrom, wild side that I hail from / I see you ain’t moved in a while / Ain’t gon’ lie, you probably should get your sails up.” But where these tricks were previously deployed to prove his skills to casual onlookers, they’ve since become full-fledged motifs and flows, habitual instead of regimented. The looser raps leave more room for the beats and bars alike to breathe, keeping attention on what Earl’s saying whether his vocals are filtered (the first half of “Live”) or degraded into fuzzy blocks of sonic texture (as on the song’s second portion).

In interviews, Earl has discussed fatherhood in urgent terms, but he’s more measured on wax. Ironically, being more grounded makes these songs less emotive than those on 2015’s bleak I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside or 2018’s jittery, freewheeling opus Some Rap Songs. Consider how alcohol fueled the recording sessions for those projects and Sick!, and you get the sense that sobriety and stability have dramatically reduced the pressure on Earl in recent years. “The earth mother gave the sun a lap, it sat me on my ass,” he announces on “INFATUATION.”

In turn, it seems the fervor and passion that previously animated his high-drama musical grapplings is now being channeled into fatherhood, which might be why Live Laugh Love feels less immediately gripping than prior solo outings. Instead, Earl’s slice-of-life raps trace a scenic route through the emotional landscape, assured that listeners will follow him off the beaten path. “Gleaning what I can from what I have amassed,” he shrugs. “I’m sticking with simple plans / I’m just a man.”

Earl has characterized Sick! as something of a last hurrah for his roaring twenties, and Alchemist collab / NFT drop VOIR DIRE broadly scanned as similarly low-stakes. So although this isn’t his first album as a parent, Live Laugh Love feels like the first to truly focus on Earl as a father. Naturally, this invites comparison to other parenthood-preoccupied projects like JAY-Z’s 4:44 or Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers. But those albums were unsettled, reluctant to let go of single life or perturbed by the growth partnership demands.

By contrast, Earl slips seamlessly into his new role, content to be inside changing diapers, catching glimpses of his father’s face in his son’s likeness. “Tapped in, locked in with my little boy,” he murmurs through a low-pass filter on “Live.” “I’ma lead you to the river, I can’t sip it for you.” Later, he jokes, “the crown in the next room, it’s easy to miss / it’s truthfully just used as a stepstool,” the spoils of victory raising the next generation a little higher.