Earl Sweatshirt Sick! Review: A Direct, In-Your-Face Account of Isolation

Earl Sweatshirt’s Sick! grapples with the isolating experiences of living through a global pandemic and the inequities that it’s exacerbated. Exploring how isolation affects one’s mental health might seem like fertile ground for an artist as creative, idiosyncratic, and introspective as Earl, and for the most part, the album delivers on that promise.

At just 10 tracks and 24 minutes long, Sick! is an intensely compressed listening experience similar to Earl’s Some Rap Songs from 2018. But whereas the latter is a dense, fragmented collage of music and speech, Earl’s fourth album is comparatively more straightforward. While the skittering samples and off-kilter beats on “Fire in the Hole” and the title track find him reveling in his more experimental tendencies, tracks like “2010” and “Titanic” are more direct and in-your-face than almost anything Earl has released in years.

Sick! hops between sounds and moods while still sounding like an Earl Sweatshirt album. It’s more sonically conventional than the rapper’s past releases, but it’s also less cohesive. What grounded projects like Some Rap Songs and 2015’s I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside is their consistently dark, lo-fi atmosphere. And though Sick! exudes a similar darkness and dejection, the album’s sonic identity isn’t as defined.

Lyrically, Earl continues battling with his demons. What’s new here is the physicality of his delivery, as it sounds like he’s fighting those demons in a boxing ring rather than in his own head. Many of the songs find Earl reflecting on survival and loss: surviving his sudden rise to fame, his struggles with mental health, and the relationships that he’s lost or that have changed since he rose to prominence over a decade ago.

Earl brilliantly blurs together the past, present, and future throughout Sick! as he attempts to come to terms with an increasingly detached and unjust world. Opener “Old Friend” portrays Earl languishing in isolation as he thinks back to events and emotions from earlier in his life, while on “Lye” he expresses hope that what he’s doing in the present will be “worth the time further down the line.” The specter of failure seems to haunt him, but his striking imagery and poetic wordplay prevent the album from feeling overwrought.

There are moments where Earl’s lyricism isn’t quite as thought-provoking as in the past. His verse on the sonically grating interlude “Lobby,” though clever, doesn’t really develop into a compelling narrative. And though the beat on “Vision” is delightfully intoxicating, guest Zelooperz’s verse drags on for too long and doesn’t feel entirely connected to the song’s themes. Despite its scattered tone and occasionally underwhelming performances, though, Sick! is an important reminder of Earl’s skills as a poet of despair who’s unafraid to mine his own struggles in order to make sense of what’s happening around him.