Album Review: Earl Sweatshirt - "Live Laugh Love"

01:04 BST - 26/08/2025

Earl Sweatshirt has been an artist I’ve been fond of for some time now, his transformation from the hyper-lyrical young prodigy of Odd Future into someone a bit more out-there & a lot more sober already having been documented by people with more time & experience than myself. The newish style of his that fully crystalised with his third album Some Rap Songs has some consistent hallmarks (~25 minute runtimes, a somewhat mumbly vocal delivery, these murky low-passed beats built around slowed-down old soul samples) that have make him feel right at home with a lot of the New York underground scene (MIKE especially comes to mind) that he & fellow Californian The Alchemist (who worked with Earl on a collab album dredged up for an NFT promotion a couple years back) have effectively become honourary members of.

This latest of album of his was announced a mere week in advance, an increasingly common occurrence with album cycles these days (fellow Odd Future alumnus Tyler, The Creator similarly dropped DON’T TAP THE GLASS out of nowhere last month) & because I had to travel somewhere that day this was actually an album I listened to on launch day for once! It was pretty good!

Earl remains in near-top form with this latest entry; his performances are on-point, & the production (largely done by Theravada, who also produced a song on SICK! but whom I’m not really all that familiar with) matches Earl’s energy well. As the title suggests, it’s all very laid-back & chilled-out, almost like the lighter twin to Some Rap Songs. Very vibey. Still, the issue with Earl is that he’s that phenomenal of an artist that he’s set the bar at a stratospheric height.

Compared to Some Rap Songs or SICK! (which at least was trying to do something a little different with its much trappier sound) or even something like I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside (which was both the last gasp of his Odd Future sound & the beginning of the style that he’d really set in stone come SRS) it falls somewhat short. I get that it’s probably supposed to be a counterpart to SRS, but the parallels just mean that I spent 50% percent of my second listen being reminded of what is quite frankly a better album! If any other artist made it, Live Laugh Love would be an instant classic. With Earl, it’s easy to see it falling between the cracks after a few months just like VOIR DIRE did. Unfortunate, really.

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