Earl Sweatshirt is busy making his own music. I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside is dark, honest and minimal in a way that is almost anti-commercial. It is also much harder than any of its peers. With his last album, Doris, he was already far in his own lane. Now, he has set up home there.
This is a confessional of an album. The stark beats perfectly frame his tales of depression and make his paranoia and pain even more jagged. He cuts through it with struts, going from “Focused on my chatter, ain’t as frantic as my thoughts/Lately I’ve been panicking a lot/Feeling like I’m stranded in a mob, scrambling for Xanax out the canister to pop” to “Fishy niggas stick to eating off of hooks/Say you eating, but we see you getting cooked, nigga” in the excellent “Grief” and from “And I’m low and I’m peakin/It’s cold in the deep end” to the anthemic “Ain’t no bitch in my DNA” in “DNA”, but the core is dark. It takes a lot from the artist to bare himself like this, and the fact that most don’t dare makes this all the more powerful.
I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside requires work from its listener but this is a person laid bare, and a person who doesn’t require effort is a person not worth listening to. This album is definitely worth listening to.
Top Five Records 