VOIR DIRE – Earl Sweatshirt, The Alchemist ★★★

Year	Album	Artists	Stars	Score	Genre
2023	VOIR DIRE	Earl Sweatshirt, The Alchemist	★★★	63	Hip-Hop

Earl Sweatshirt will always be a little low energy for me, and his recent efforts have been too choppy to really hold my interest even if I know the things he’s doing and saying are interesting and creative. 

Teaming up with The Alchemist on VOIR DIRE has solved some of those problems, because Alchemist has a way of adding life to his beats in a very short time. The songs are still brief, but they quell your appetite more than the small snippets that Earl’s records since 2015 have been made of. 

Earl is still a little scatterbrained and his monotonous flow is a signature of all his works, but he’s more in his MF Doom bag here, adding more vigor to his prose (“Heat Check” and “Dead Zone” in particular felt like songs MF Doom would have thrived on). 

The lead single “The Caliphate,” featuring Vince Staples, is probably the album standout, not only because Vince and Earl always play off each other well (“Mancala” also featuring Vince is another strong showing on the record). Heavenly, bright strings that almost feel like they’re blaring high above the deep, menacing bass and drums give the song a lot of energy. 

I think this is probably Earl Sweatshirt’s best album to date, and at 26 minutes, the album’s easy to get through and is smooth from track to track. But, while the potential is there, and so is the intrigue, it does still feel a little lacking or incomplete. I don’t doubt that Earl has a masterpiece in him, but he hasn’t been able to pull everything together yet in my mind.