Sick!

A fantastic release, ‘SICK!’ pushes Earl Sweatshirt into a new chapter of his work, while adding further context to what has come before. The production work is impeccable, its dizzying imaginative flurry the perfect hinge against Earl’s lyrical precision. Short but emphatically creative, it presents an entire universe to explore, with its finer details laying in wait for repeated listens.

SICK! is a pure rap album, as only Earl Sweatshirt could deliver.

It is brief, for sure, but it is packed with densely packaged rhymes and rewarding musical numbers that are majestic.

Sick! doesn’t recontextualize the genre in the same way Some Rap Songs did, but it’s an act of self-revolution. It magnifies a newly assured Earl Sweatshirt, skin shed and free to ascend.

Even when you don’t understand his choices, you can’t argue with them, because you know they are coming from a place of thoughtful artistic creativity.

A few of these ten songs burble with easy rhythms – “Lye” rocks with crunchy, prog rock horns looped by The Alchemist. But overall, the tone of SICK! feels contemplative, slowly unfurling with repeated listens even as Earl crams over 20 minutes of thoughts into the work, with no hooks to leaven the intensity. [Mar 2022, p.43]

This is the most esoteric, thinking-person’s cloud rap album I’ve heard since Shabazz Palaces’ Black Up, and I mean that in the most endearing, complimentary way possible.

The album takes a more digestible approach than its predecessor, Feet of Clay; while still heavy on metaphors and wordplay, it’s not buried under cryptic mystique, allowing one of rap’s most prominent enigmas to come out of the shadows.

Sharp, direct, and fluid in a way that's almost supernatural, Sick! perfectly conveys the duality of frustration and drive to persevere that arises from living through exceptionally difficult times.

Lucidity, seldom felt as strongly in the kaleidoscopic cacophony of 2018's Some Rap Songs and on the shadowy, spectral 2019 EP Feet of Clay, is at the core of SICK!

Sick! emerges with musicality enhanced, full of strings, soul samples, arpeggiating pianos and vinyl crackle – sometimes, as on the immersive Vision and Tabula Rasa, all at once.

Displaying an amazing musical ear, as he’s picked monstrously riveting instrumentals to rap confidently on, Earl Sweatshirt’s latest feat feels so effortlessly him. And there’s not much higher praise than that.

On his most legible album, he’s actively engaged in dismantling what it means for rappers to go in, and to evolve as artists. Without punchlines, hooks, eccentric beats, and flashy flows, he finds ways to astound and delight, avoiding gimmicks as well as grandstanding.

They offer the promise of something more perhaps in the future, with richer, bolder production: another tantalising glimpse of Earl’s unique and enduring charm.

SICK! carries the ever-popular lo-fi vibe as well as a blend of stellar hip-hop. Artists utilising lockdown as a creative direction is not uncommon these days, however Sweatshirt’s attempt carries a distinct sense of realness.