Album of the Week // 24-28 January

Earl Sweatshirt used to make you sift through the mud to find the gold. On his latest album, the nuggets are gleaming right on the surface.

Two of the album’s major influences—new fatherhood and the ongoing pandemic—represent Earl’s own pondering of the orbs of life and death. COVID looms over every song, with overt references to masks, vaccines, and isolation throughout, but the responsibility he feels for his son drives his response to this strange and perilous present. It’s what inspired him to scrap a more “optimistic” 19-track version of the project: “This has been another crash course in the fact that this shit ain’t about me no more,” he recently told Rolling Stone. Dread of COVID dovetails with the album’s broader understanding of truth as the remedy for whatever ails. “This game of telephone massive/I do what I have to with the fragments,” he says on “Tabula Rasa.” It’s urgent and calming all at once.