Some Rap Songs
A brilliant, claustrophobic collage of dusty, micro-looped jazz samples and raw, grief-stricken poetry. Intimate, fragmented, and deeply moving.
A brilliant, claustrophobic collage of dusty, micro-looped jazz samples and raw, grief-stricken poetry. Intimate, fragmented, and deeply moving.
Experimental breakthrough
A loop of crackling, dust-choked jazz cuts off mid-breath, replacing the polished venom of prior releases with the suffocating weight of immediate grief. This record is the precise point where technical mastery surrendered to raw survival, abandoning traditional song structures for fifteen miniature collages of fractured memory and family ghosts. By burying the vocals beneath a dense fog of lo-fi static, the performance forces you to lean into the wreckage, listening not to a polished statement, but to the actual process of a brilliant mind reconstructing itself from the debris of loss.
The record leans heavily into a dense, claustrophobic fog of grief, transforming personal loss into a series of raw and conversational late-night transmissions.
Critics widely admired the album's warm blending of avant-garde jazz and hip-hop, praising its brief, focused tracks and deeply personal poetry. The record was warmly received as a complex and highly original work, with reviewers appreciating its refusal of simple resolutions and its beautifully restrained, introspective mood.
“Don’t be fooled by the title - the rapper’s third album is dense, experimental and deeply fascinating”Read review
“The album could be a blueprint for the future sound of hip-hop, but for now, it’s unlikely the avant-garde lyricism will dominate RapCaviar anytime soon”Read review
“One of hip-hop’s most original voices describes the feeling of drowning even as art keeps ascending”Read review
“With his latest record, the onetime teen prodigy reemerges as the face of a new sound and scene that blurs the line between avant-garde jazz and hip-hop”Read review
“Although a very strong record for what it is, Some Rap Songs lacks the emotional power of the two albums that preceded it”Read review
“Powerful, emotional poetry”Read review
“A conversation full of jaw-dropping beats and refreshing lines that ends too soon”Read review
“Earl is a formalist who knows exactly when he’s done making his point, a skill that puts him above most contemporaries just as firmly as his lyrical talents”Read review
“Some Rap Songs refuses a neat, generalizable diagnosis of the state of Earl or of the world, and for that it deserves time in a stirless room of the mind where speculation is kept at bay”
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