In 2017, a rising, then-18-year-old rapper named MIKE revealed to Pitchfork what now feels like a fated connection with Thebe Kgositsile, the prodigy turned doyen who has performed as Earl Sweatshirt since he was a teenager. "He was my favorite rapper for a very long time, and I used to study his form. He influenced me so much," MIKE said. As the younger rapper put what he was learning into practice and began building his own buzz on Bandcamp, Kgositsile bought one of his early mixtapes. MIKE's messaged thank-you note led the two to strike up a friendship that doubled as a rap apprenticeship. By 2018, Kgositsile's association with MIKE and his NYC cohort had bent his own sound toward their frequency, manifesting on the album Some Rap Songs. They toured together in 2019, and in the years since, their orbits have helped to shape an entire indie rap scene in their image.
The double album the two rappers released together last week, Pompeii // Utility, is the culmination of that nearly decade-long give and take. "We've been working toward the same thing for a long time," MIKE said in an interview with The Face. "It was already there." The double-album format is a fairly obvious proclamation: They are co-billed stars with a symbiotic relationship, not co-dependent but mutually inspirational. It's a funny record — a long-awaited full-length collab in which the partners rarely appear side-by-side, à la OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. Only, unlike that release, which leaned into the creative divergence of its yin-yang duo, Pompeii // Utility finds its leads playing around at different ends of the same sandbox. But even that tactic comes with a fascinating artistic juxtaposition: While its songs are performed in a garbled house style indicative of their 2020s catalogs, in hookless configurations aspiring to a now-expected brevity (most tracks are around or under two minutes long), it takes a daring left turn sonically. Both halves of the joint album are produced by Surf Gang, the post-trap collective that makes murky, muted, synth-powered beats for digital natives. In a certain sense, it formalizes a statement that Earl and MIKE have been making about their work for years: that it is not on a pedestal but out in the field, engaging in a near-constant cooperative mission.
Surf Gang's involvement binds the two albums together like a duplex, with separate entryways but a sense of shared responsibility. The two songs that feature both artists, one on each half, reinforce this principle: On MIKE's "Kirkland," Earl ad-libs through his partner's verse, while on Earl's "Leadbelly," MIKE slingshots around his mentor, drafting off Earl's flow like a trailer at a skate rink. The production on both cuts shares a fuzzy disorientation, the feeling you get when your eyes unfocus. Most Surf Gang beats feel this way — like experiments in abstraction, bleating and robotic yet painterly, distant but subtly thumping, and a world away from the simmered soul loops of previous MIKE and Earl collaborations like "allstar."
As wunderkinds of different generations, inclined to deep thought, scholarly reference, cerebral turns of phrase and soul sampling, both rappers have shouldered the burden of traditionalist rap expectations. They joked in the interview with The Face that this project would alienate a huge swath of their overlapping fanbases, those who see them as keepers of the ancient texts and would now complain that they are "rapping over beeps and boops." It has been refreshing to watch two of hip-hop's defining modern lyricists cut down the puritanical notion that "real" rap must have a literary quality, and the album should put to bed once and for all the misnomers that trap or so-called "mumble rap" are somehow lesser forms. One of hip-hop discourse's most common misconceptions is that articulation necessarily precedes clarity of thought. Pompeii // Utility clearly speaks to the contrary, as both artists toy with fogged-up bars that are often enlightened: "Much of life, tug of war / I trust the lies and bloody swords / And young or wise, I wasn't sure," MIKE raps on "Shutter Island."
Even if those purist gripes were true, rap is a performance, as much about the texture of phonetics as meaning. The voice is an instrument, too, which is why a room-commanding presence like Public Enemy's Chuck D has often inferred that the way you sound is more of a precursor to being a great rapper than what you say. Both matter, but Earl and MIKE seem to understand how deeply the stitched-together process of weaving rhymes can depend on the grain or smoothness of the underlying fabric: The former creates the pattern, but the latter gives it feel and character. What is prized above all here is composition as antecedent to utility, and wear as a sign of comfortability, durability and ease of use. Earl has been adamant that there wasn't much overthinking, and you can hear it in the playful way they flit through verses, measuring the dimensionality of voice and how deployment of words can modify overtones. Across the two albums they adopt many modes: slurred ("Da Bid," "Book of Eli"), sturdy ("Minty"), pitched-up ("Chali 2na") and even tuneful ("Don't Worry!"). MIKE plays to his natural gruffness while Earl withdraws into wheezes, but both are moving toward the same end in tandem: a casualness and simplicity so profound that it implies inherent mastery and wisdom.
While this experiment does make a compelling case for the two artists as rap catalysts of equal stature that have taken turns informing each other's processes, its format also demonstrates the space between a distinguished padawan and his young OG as craftsmen and hip-hop laureates. All other things being equal — production, shared studio sessions, mic time — the scales tip toward Kgositsile, who is in rare form here, a sage entering a meditative state. That isn't a slight to MIKE, who is among the sharpest, most paradigm-challenging minds rap has. Earl Sweatshirt is simply one of the most gifted rappers ever. His stream of consciousness seems to unspool an endless series of maxims, and the almost lackadaisical way in which he delivers most raps cannot mask their technicality. "They crumble in the castle, all that money over fam s*** / Mud on the casket, blood on the canvas / Ain't seen you go to battle, why you speaking on that matter? / Demons in the chapel, the choir preaching back," he murmurs on Utility opener "this2shallpass," playing with drama and contrasts like a baroque painter.
Still, it feels important to step out of rap's competitive mindset for just a spell and consider the thing in its totality, what it seems to argue for in the genre, creatively and philosophically: that holism and individuality aren't mutually exclusive, and that co-authorship can be a dialogue forcing an interrogation of the self. "I don't want to be the face of the league / Feel like Ant, it's bigger than me," Earl raps on "Earth." I read that comment as an explanation for why he has moved away from the more showily impressive writing of his early albums, and why this latest partnership is one of true kindred spirits. It goes back to something MIKE said in 2017: "It doesn't have to be as detailed; the simple s*** will hit you the hardest with him," he mused about King Krule creator Archy Marshall's writing, before putting Earl and Sade in the same camp. "Producing and writing can be hard for me, so listening to them helped me say what I wanted." In their back and forth now, I hear two rappers in that process: listening, assisting, so that the other might uncover what the collective needs to hear.
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