The rap savant’s fifth studio album strips away everything to focus on what’s most important: Family.
It’s impossible to decipher Earl Sweatshirt’s mood without listening deeply and intently to his lyrics on his 2025 LP, Live Laugh Love. This is by design. In fact, 99% of Earl’s career, since he drank that drug cocktail smoothie in the “Earl” video back in 2010, has been about stripping his art from the context in which most people know it. His career really took off while he was attending boarding school in Samoa; Odd Future shows were buoyed by “Free Earl” chants and Complex actually tracked him down to reveal the details of his schooling. Upon his return, he was the prodigal son; MF DOOM for the internet age, the son of a poet who treated writing lyrics as a gravely serious endeavor. He began stripping his music to its roots.
His debut LP, 2013’s Doris, moved towards this space but still kept his Odd Future connects in close orbit. By the time he released Some Rap Songs in 2018, he had fully embraced the New York underground, connecting with MCs like Navy Blue and MIKE and working with jazz ensemble Standing on the Corner. The songs were monuments to the concept of rap itself, songs reverse-engineered from the traditional verse-chorus structure to each word working towards forming one perfect bar, again and again.
There’s a lyric on “Free the Ruler,” the last song on Earl Sweatshirt’s 2023 LP, Voir Dire, produced entirely by The Alchemist. The song title is a tribute to the late, great Drakeo the Ruler, a Los Angeles-born rapper who spent much of his adult life unfairly persecuted by the LAPD. He was murdered shortly after he gained his freedom, though his style and flow patterns have inspired the Los Angeles sound (his sonic fingerprints are all over GNX, for example). Earl takes one of his trademark lines, (“Anything you see me doin’, it’s not normal),” and flips it: “It’s not normal, but I swear this shit is regular.” It’s this idea that he runs with on Live Laugh Love.
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There’s nothing normal about his life — touring with Wiz Khalifa, raising two small children, balancing being one of the most successful rappers on the planet with the little shit that now lights him up. Take “Heavy Metal aka ejecto seato!,” the album’s penultimate track. The beat is all weed smoke and weepy strings; a classic from Child Actor. “2016, I had a dream of my son crawling ’round on the ceiling/ And I had never seen him/ Finally found the meaning/ Condo for me, him, and his mama keep the sweet digs,” he raps. Now, he’s got a second child, but the dream remains the same. Is there anything better in this life than a comfortable place to live and the feeling that those you love most are equally secure? Here’s where the cringe title comes into play.
In an illuminating and highly recommended interview with New York Times’ “Popcast,” Earl spoke about how the title is a joke, but not really, but kinda. He said to co-hosts Joe Coscarelli and Jon Caramanica, “I guess the joke was on me because that shit was serious as fuck, like, if you have kids, that shit is not even kind of funny at all. If someone says ‘live, laugh, love’ and you have kids, you’re like, ‘exactly, brother.’”
With Live Laugh Love he brings the droll irony of his 16-year-old self directly into conversation with the 30-something who wants nothing more than to live and laugh and love, preferably all the time. He’s not suggesting that happiness is the antithesis of art, but rather if you refuse to grow your music will stagnate, too. It’s beautiful.
Despite the joy, rap music is still a deathly serious endeavor. That’s what makes Earl one of the most thrilling artists on the planet, one of art’s great creators. Humor and pathos dance dizzily with praxis; the urgency is in the work, in the daily practice of doing this again and again such that when it finally comes time to hit record, the reps and habits make space for improv, for giggles and inside jokes. These are em dashes among greater treatises, little deflections that honor the 16-year-old shit stirrer still somewhere in his psyche.
On “WELL DONE!” he raps: “Bail us out the bond, mask over my eyes just like a welder/ Tailspun outta binds, baptized in the fires of flaw and failures.” Who else raps like that? Maybe Billy Woods? No wonder the dudes are homies. No one else thinks like they do, can rap as intellectually with such approachability. A few bars later: “Tough like rye or spelt, Orion-sized heavyweight titles on the belt, son/ Flying in on the wide eye of the maelstrom, wild side that I hail from.” It’s certainly not normal.
On album closer “exhaust,” which is a co-production from him and Navy Blue, Earl begins: “Worked harder than a bitch.” Sometimes you don’t have to say a lot when a little will do. Earl makes it sound easy, nonchalant, occasionally ambivalent, but no one hides the seams, the blood and sweat of practice, better than him. All Earl has is the words he spits and the family he raises. Towards the end of the song he raps, “At the end of the day/ It’s really just you and whatever you think.” We come with nothing and leave with nothing. As Earl ages and grows, so too does his philosophy develop. Way back when, he would have laughed in the face of anyone who dared utter something like ‘live, laugh, love.’ Now? It’s the only shit that matters.
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