For AW24 and INDIE’s 12” edition, Earl Sweatshirt reflects on the spry tendencies of life turned 30.
In the words of one of his favourite memes, Earl Sweatshirt is 30, Tryin to make a change :-\ “He’s been projecting more positive energy lately,” reads the top comment on a recent YouTube interview. “Constructive. Not just real and depressing. But real and awoken. He found his way through.”
After a rocky few years, Earl Sweatshirt—born Thebe Neruda Kgositsile—has entered a new era. He’s “cleaned up his act,” as the media loves to say. He’s a father now. He’s working out. He’s stopped drinking. He’s keeping up with his appearance. Our interview is delayed because he’s at the barber shop getting a trim.
When we eventually connect, I’m Zooming from a woodland-painted childhood bedroom (not my own) somewhere in the English countryside, and Earl joins from a 1970s French-style bedroom (not his own) in Downtown LA. “Hello!” he says as his head enters the frame. “I’m ‘bout to get some shit called a campfire mocha.” He scrolls PostMates, and proceeds to read the description to me: “Rich espresso blends with velvety chocolate and vanilla, topped with the house-made toasted marshmallow cinnamon graham cracker crumb, with sea salt for a truly indulgent treat!”
That’s the most American shit I ever heard,” I tell him. “And then finishing it off with oat milk,” he laughs.
He picks up a turtle figurine he’s just found and holds it up to the camera, grinning. I ask how he is. “I’m really good, man,” he answers, and I can tell he means it. “I’m surprisingly sprightly for having just come off the road.”
Earl has just wrapped his UK/Europe tour, and his fans are noticing the shift in energy. “Saw the [goat emoji] in Manchester and he was actually feeling the crowd for once [crying laughing face],” one Reddit user wrote last month. “Just seeing Earl being happy makes me happy,” said another.
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Day one fans of Earl Sweatshirt have been on one hell of a ride over the past 16 years. They’ve watched him evolve from the brash teenage lyricist of Odd Future’s chaotic come-up, to an introspective and innovative artist responsible for some of the rawest bars in rap. They were captivated by the primal, nihilistic energy of Earl—where shock-value bars and complex rhyme schemes soundtracked his anarchic and outlandish rise. They rally-cried “FREE EARL!” when he was sent away to a correctional boarding school in Samoa for bad behaviour at 16, and waited impatiently for his return.
They debated his tone-shift on Doris, where the vulnerability of tracks like ‘Chum’ revealed a deeper layer to his artistry—offering glimpses into his struggles with depression, isolation, and the complexities of fame. They stuck with him through I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, defending a darker, more insular approach—understanding the weight of loss and isolation he was working through. By Some Rap Songs, they’d come to expect the unexpected—his sound fractured and lo-fi, a meditation on grief and the complicated relationship with his father Keorapetse Kgositsile aka Bra Willie, political activist and former Poet Laureate of South Africa. Some were worried by his increasing alcohol consumption. Some were perplexed by the drop-less, accordion loop on ‘EAST’. Others remained staunchly faithful. Along the way, they made memes of his deadpan delivery, they lovingly mocked his rap flow. They laughed with him, they cried with him. They grew up with him. They understood that Earl was not just some precocious protégé of Tyler, The Creator, he was an artist—and a person—coming into his own.
There are a million things I could have asked Earl Sweatshirt—whether he still has Sly Tendencies, what really went down in Samoa, whatever happened to wanting to quit music; about the soul-searching Feet of Clay bars that revealed his battle with grief. I could have asked him about his “fall-out” with Tyler, or where he got his wizard hat. But Earl’s appeal has always been about more than mythology—it’s his understated intellect, desiccated sense of humour, and his relentless ability to keep it real.
“He’s an incredible comedian,” his mother—UCLA law scholar and critical race theorist Cheryl I. Harris—confessed in a talk Earl held with her at MOCA in 2020. “I mean like really, if he wasn’t doing this, he could be doing that.” Sure, Earl Sweatshirt hasn’t always been happy—but he’s always been funny. Catch him on a good day, and he’ll gladly shoot the shit. I—as it fortuitously seems is becoming the norm—catch him on a good day.
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HARRIET SHEPHERD: Sorry to miss you in Berlin. How was it?
EARL SWEATSHIRT: I love Berlin. There’s a lot of friends that moved there, so we got good recommendations and got to do fun shit, and go make music and just see how artists is doing it in Berlin. The Germany-Detroit thing. Someone gave me just like a loose abridged People’s History of like, why the vibe got like that. Super fire.
HS: Techno really became like the soundtrack of Germany’s reunification, and these teenagers from the East and West meeting for the first time.
ES: And at the same time, bro, South Africa was doing it too. It was a country that was dancing about it. And kwaito and all this mid-tempo house shit, that was, like, the first music I listened to. It’s just so cool seeing, like, where those pins dropped on the map.
HS: You were born in 1994, almost exactly two months before Apartheid ended.
ES: Yeah, I grew up with the country.
HS: I’m from ‘94 also.
ES: We might be some of the last human beings…but don’t quote me! [laughs].
HS: Okay… we went there.
ES: I think we’re a special one, because we had home phones, dial-up. I think we saw the sun set on how things used to be… and now it’s just night-time.
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HS: We saw anxiety be instilled in people, in real time…
ES: Yes! Oh my god, you actually feel me. ‘Cos even people a couple years younger than me, their experience is totally different. They was using the shit when they shit was still sponged out. By the time I was right here with it, it was too late. I had already been outside too much. Like, I’m okay if my phone breaks, I, like, memorise n****s’ numbers. I know how to get places in my city. Yeah, no-one else is like us.
HS: We’re the last!
ES: [Adopting a cartoonishly menacing voice] This is what’s wrong with children! No one’s like me.
HS: Did you feel any type of way about turning 30?
ES: Hell yeah! I changed my whole life. I changed my whole entire life.
HS: I heard you’re on your health journey, and going to the gym with Denzel Washington?
ES: Easily. This is me. This is my life [laughs]. I had a funny 20s. Everything, socially, was super advanced for me on the front end of my 20s—to the point where I couldn’t handle it. Because I spent the end of my childhood in the program, I was a little bit socially undercooked. I’m like, “I haven’t started having sex yet—like, what are y’all….? What is right now? I’m… scared.” So I spent the first four years of my 20s very reserved, very high on weed, very music-minded. Then at the mid-20s, I was like “Oh.” I learned how to, like, drink a cocktail, and then that turned into the drinking that I would have been doing if I wasn’t being reserved and weird at the beginning of my 20s. Then I looked up after four, five years and was like, “Wow, I’m going to die.” [Laughs] And so then I hit 30. I’m like, “I don’t want to die.” So now I’m with Denzel, and this is me and Denzel, not dying. Every day, we look at each other.—[nods, and salutes.]
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HS: I mean, I respect it. You gotta do it at some point.
ES: For sure. Especially because first off, I’m a passionate person, I’m an overachiever. So whatever I do, I’m gonna really do that shit. So with the drinking shit, it was like, I’m gonna show you that I’m the only one that can do this. And I was looking, and I was like, if I do this for five years, I’m going to look so nasty when I’m 40 years old. I’m not going to be able to, like, walk or something. I don’t know. It’s just, I could tell that it was, like, the grace period ends right here. All that childhood invincibility, like… Nah, your fate is in your hands once that 30 hits…
HS: You suddenly become confronted with your own mortality.
ES: Definitely, there’s like a part of brain development, like a childhood invincibility that I think comes in as you’re fully straightening your back, at like 19, and then there’s also no recovery time for figurative and literal falls. So you’re like, “I can just smack my head on shit. It doesn’t matter.” I think this year, I started doing like “aghhh” [grunts like an old man] when I get up and shit.
HS: “My back hurts…”
ES: I’m so annoyed if I don’t work out for like, seven days bro. I’ll tell my friend about all the imbalances in my body. And he’s like, stop talking to me. But we’re here. We’re doing the health thing, we’re off the road.
HS: It’s about to be Halloween…
ES: Spooky season, spooky season.
HS: And you have a kid now. Halloween is already a big enough deal in the US…
ES: But with the babies bro? Them n****s is next level, bro. Like, he just dressed up for his birthday…
HS: As what?
ES: Michael Jackson. My son is hard, bro. He just got into a Michael phase. It’s really good. He hella wanted white socks, like hella bad. It’s pretty crazy that all humans have a scheduled Michael Jackson phase.
HS: What age was yours?
ES: Same age as his, like, four. I was like, Oh, now I have to do this, like every day. Fire. When was the last time you moonwalked?
HS: I’m too stiff to do that.
ES: I just moonwalked last week, I’m not gonna lie. I just hit a full one in the parking lot for my friend’s mom.
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HS: Gotta stay young.
ES: I’m so annoying. I’m so much on the “stay young” shit. I told my girl the other day, I was like, yo, we gotta do this long ass walk, bro. Like, one day, you’ll be thankful for it. One day you’re not gonna be able to walk.
HS: Have you seen these people on Twitter though, who are genuinely doing 60,000 steps a day. The whole comment section is like “you’re gonna die. Your knees are gonna buckle beneath you.”
ES: People be lying on the internet, for sure. Or they don’t lie, and it’s maybe more insane than lying. I would lie. I would say that I was doing that and not do that at all. We actually did 60,000 steps, no doubt, in Berlin.
HS: In a club or?
ES: [Laughs]. No, just walking around. That’s how we fell in love with it. We have a thing of like, when we tour, we make a really explicit decision to actually experience the cities that we’re in, because it’s so easy to just go from playing, to hotel, to green room and kill yourself—oh my god. And then it’s like, you’re righteously depressed. You didn’t do anything, you haven’t seen anything, you’ve only been indoors. People are getting to experience you, and you don’t get to experience the people. And that shit is a heartbreaking imbalance. So we make a really explicit point, whenever we get to the city, to just set our bags down and go outside. Also, I found out that that is a rarity among Americans travelling the rest of the world. Americans don’t walk. We have a horrible reputation.
HS: You kinda have to drive in LA though…
ES: I was definitely not playing it on, like, regular mode. I just started driving, [eyes dart to the side… to someone behind the camera] I just started driving recently, [long pause.] I just got my licence recently. Um, yes, yeah, it’s stupid. It’s stupid out here. But it’s better when you hit this, “I repent. I changed my life” mode. It’s really nice out here.
HS: Green juice for days?
ES: Everywhere. It’s so good for me. But, yeah— outside of that, I think you have to have a really healthy relationship with yourself to live in Los Angeles comfortably. I think if you wanna get into stuff to be distracted, it’s going to suck, because all of the shit to get into is not enough to distract you from yourself. I think in the rest of the world, better quality people use cocaine. I think in Los Angeles, the people that use cocaine are not the best.
HS: Umm… hard disagree. [I think people who use cocaine—in general—aren’t the best.]
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ES: In Los Angeles, it’s very specific, man. It’s not like, “oh I didn’t even know you were taking cocaine,” in LA it’s like this [pulls a very wide-eyed face]. Wild cocaine conversations.
HS: I start getting concerned about my brain the older I get…
ES: That chemistry? Oh yeah! I drink a Celsius and… Celsius kind of leaves me in the same place as cocaine users. We’re both out here at like 5am like “yeah, oh 100%, great idea.” [nodding profusely].
HS: There’s this TikTok theory—that probably didn’t originate on TikTok, though I saw it there—that people are either “music” people or “lyrics” people. Like, when you’re listening to music passively, you’re more drawn to one or the other. They analyse how it relates to personality, empathy, logic, reasoning. One is processed through the left side of the brain, and one the right. I am always more drawn to the music, melodies, and instrumentation—even the rhythms, delivery and flow of the vocals more than the actual words. Sometimes I’ll listen to a song I’ve heard a thousand times, and hear a lyric for the first time. What about you?
ES: I think when you’re on this side of it… I would break it down like this: People drive cars. Like a lot of people in the world, drive cars. But there’s a different effect on the brain that being a long distance truck driver has. The car becomes an extension of your person, for real. You’re not even thinking. You think with the car, you express yourself with the car. And I think I have that with music. And why I would draw that Venn diagram is to point at the united zone, where both me and long distance truck drivers have lost our minds doing what we love.
HS: Right.
ES: And there’s good things that come with that, like the fact that when the music comes on for me, I am so in. I am so involved with every single part. I know this because this happens with my musician friends. We’ll be sitting there talking, and some shit’ll be playing, and we’ll be talking, and then if some funny shit happens in the music, or if it’s just like, not good, or whatever, we’ll just both be like [sharp turn of the head.] We’ll react to it, and if we’re with someone else, they would be like, what? What are you talking about?
HS: You have a third ear for it…
ES: It’s like a language. Like the time that it would take me to break something down in Spanish—I understand it a little bit, and I could put together what someone’s saying, but there’s time that it takes for me to translate what he’s saying into the English word in the brain. Whereas, if that’s my language, we don’t have to do any of that. We can go somewhere else in the conversation. And I feel like musicians have that with music. And that’s why the shit that makes musicians freak out is the shit that makes it go “What? What did they just do?” Like this is not regular speak.
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HS: What’s the last thing that you heard that made you have that reaction?
ES: This kid from Atlanta, Rocket. He’s so good. He’s so weird. He goes a lot of places, melodically. Him, 454—I don’t know if you heard this shit that he just dropped yesterday.
HS: No!
ES: Bro, this guy. Have this guy arrested. He’s too good. He’s so good, and he’s so humble. It’s fucking crazy. He came over my crib the day he dropped this shit. It sounded crazy, and he’s like [shy voice] “yeah, bro, I’m tryna do this other shit though. That’s just like some other shit I just put together.” He’s like, “oh, it’s not mixed very well.” It’s the best music. It’s like a landmark project for rap music.
HS: The humility makes it even better.
ES: Yeah, Willie is one of the best things we got going, for sure. Who else? Obviously, the new Future. He did some shit on there. He invents. He got a thing. He’s rapping like he’s two people at the same time. That shit is real big brain. The only other person I heard do that shit really recently is Sauce Walka—he did this trick where it’s like two things weaving at the same time. You have your verse that’s working with itself, and then your ad libs rhyming with each other, and it doesn’t rhyme with the verse. It’s big brain. It’s left and right.
HS: I love that. As a writer I’ve always approached music from more of a cultural angle… I’ve never been great at articulating what it’s doing technically. But I love Dissect, and these YouTube analyses that scrutinise music—it makes me able to listen in a different way.
ES: Absolutely, like, knowing what’s happening, for sure. If that’s the shit that helps you be able to take apart the gun and put it back together. Because you can strip something down, and then you can start listening to different things on purpose. And from a creative side, that shit is super tight, because it’s the way I end up being able to experiment. It’s like how a magic trick is based on a change in perception, not necessarily a change in reality. Or, like how two squares [draws two squares in the air], is just two squares. But then if I draw lines like this [draws interconnecting lines] it’s three dimensional, it’s a cube. That same shit happens with music, where, when you get into being able to listen to one thing, then you can play the rest of the music like it’s going to that one thing, and though there’s something else… It’s a way to treat yourself with a surprise collage, so that it never feels too contrived or formulaic.
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HS: Are you a podcast person?
ES: No… I mean, I used to, with my ex, I was listening to, like the Chris Lighty podcast, that was a crazy podcast. And then Shit… Shitville? What was that one? See I’m old for real. Way back when they had some shit called Shit Town. Or something. [The podcast in question is S-Town.]
HS: Oh God, okay.
ES: It’s really good. You should listen to it. It’s about this place a guy did a crime… It was weird?
HS: Oh, it’s like a true crime podcast?
ES: I’m on that type shit right there. I’m on true crime. I don’t want to know what to think, I want to know what happened.
HS: Ok this Zoom is gonna end in less than a minute…
ES: Wait, is this a jail call?
HS: [Laughs]. I’m not paying for Zoom Pro.
ES: Ok you wanna know everything about my life really quickly?
HS: Yeah, just really quick.
ES: [Slurring, hyperspeed] Born in Chicago Illinois 1994… the first time I played basketball, I was, like two years old. I remember seeing, like, the Chicago Bulls win the championship… like red and black… always in my head… is associated. I understand that… [unintelligible]… like a sponge state…move to LA.
[Zoom cuts out.]
Talent EARL SWEATSHIRT
Photography XAVIER SCOTT MARSHALL
Styling WALTER MOSZEL WILLIAMS
Production HARRIET SHEPHERD
Local Production MATEEN MORTAZAVI at DIRTY PRETTY PRODUCTIONS
Set Design ANNIKA FISCHER
Photography Assistant MCKAYLA CHANDLER
Styling Assistant MYRIAH EVE RIVERA
Production Assistant JAZMIN JOHNSON
