When I profiled Thebe Kgositsile, the poet scion turned ace rapper known as Earl Sweatshirt, in 2018, he shared a refreshing outlook on delivery that has stuck with me. He'd just released Some Rap Songs, a modern rap masterpiece, and at least some of its sorcery was in how much insight he had packed into 25 minutes. Streaming bloat was already in full swing, and the decision, he told me, was more about consideration than curation. "I don't want to waste people's time," he said. "N****s got s*** to do out here, period. I'm trying to say a lot of s***. It's really dense. It can be overwhelming and have an air of exclusivity to it, a pompousness that I feel is only balanced out by me being like, I know what I'm doing to you. So I'ma sprint for you. I'ma act like your time is valuable." In subsequent years, he has stayed true to that promise, releasing lean projects that are 15, 24, 27, and 24 minutes long, their imagined "pompousness" always distinctly overridden by brevity.
In our swamped streaming landscape, the allure of such format-breakers is evergreen, an oasis for the content-addled mind. But the most recent of those Earl projects, an August 2025 opus called Live Laugh Love, has me reflecting on his statement again with a bit of added perspective. It isn't simply that a short album, crowded on all sides by behemoths, now feels exacting and measured by comparison, less actively trying to sap your attention and suck you into a deepening bog — though there is value in such a thing. I'm more drawn to what Kgositsile's words imply about community, about rapport with the audience. I know what I'm doing to you — the kind of affirmation that feels like making a silent pact. This album is 24 minutes long out of respect for his devotees, with whom there is already a spiritual conversation taking place. There is no bait here because there is nothing to catch; those who exist outside of its sphere of influence are not being targeted. Instead, the album is an offering, in the sacrificial sense, a little collection of proverbs seeking not response but revelation. It's a proposition embodied by a line on the new record's "INFATUATION": "Gleaning what I can from what I have amassed / The space-time continuum bend, I'm sticking with the simple plans / I'm just a man."
Kgositsile is the archetype for a certain kind of mid-level star. His buddy Tyler, the Creator has made the jump to full-on mainstream entity at the Grammys and on the charts (while largely keeping his creative virtue intact), but Earl's notoriety is detached, more self-contained and in some ways more replicable. He is a folk hero who has carved out a little empire for himself, away from the attention ecosystem and the machinations of the playlist model. In this space, the decision not to play the content game is a sign that an artist has more or less accepted a siloed existence. Considering the climate, that could be a path forward for many more cult indie-rap figures. Count the Chicagoan Mick Jenkins and the Angeleno 03 Greedo among the rare rappers who have found themselves on similar tracks as artists off to the side, iconoclasts eschewing the centrist ambitions of most of their contemporaries. On their latest projects, the two MCs embrace the Earl Sweatshirt compression philosophy to great effect.
Mick Jenkins has joined this wave gradually over the years. Though always an intentional artist, he has adopted a pithier mindset that sharpens with each new record. Case in point: Every album he released until 2023's The Patience was shorter than the last. Uncoincidentally, that record is his best, and his new LP, A MURDER OF CROWS, a collaboration with the producer Emil, is nearly as tightly coiled and efficient. If The Patience was a developmental milestone in which a generational talent accepts that he may never get what he's owed, A MURDER OF CROWS is the calm that comes after that epiphany. It is all about locking in, tuning out yappers, building movements if not monuments.
"I can't do them great Pyrenees things," he raps on "Dream Chasers." "All them pharaohs that showed, ain't no barrels of gold gon' go with you when you die in them pyramid schemes." This is Jenkins coming to terms with precision, and his increasing grasp is its own reward. When the rapper refers to himself as tenured on "Workers' Comp," his new mandate is clear: His spot, as rap scholar and educator, is secured. The satisfaction of knowing your worth reverberates across the sober soundscape, as the rapper makes the most of his circumstances: "We got plans with low budgets, feel like the world in my hands," he raps on the closer. Jenkins may not be as renowned as other locals in his Young Chicago Authors class — Chance the Rapper, Noname and Saba, to name a few — but he is just as distinguished, and a master of his own domain.
Like Jenkins, the Watts rapper 03 Greedo has become a local legend, albeit on a very different trajectory. He was already building one of the great contemporary resumes in West Coast rap when he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2018, having taken a plea deal on drugs and weapons charges that would otherwise have amounted to a 300-year sentence. "I wish i coulda stayed with my family but life isnt fair to some of us. Plenty music will be released while im gone. Promise me you will love me forever," he wrote online. He had nearly resigned himself to a non-career in the depressingly extensive subgenre of lockup rap, dropping three EPs and three albums while behind bars, when he was released on parole in 2023. As a result, both Halfway There (2023) and Hella Greedy (2024), his post-prison LPs, are sprawling works, outstretched in response to newfound freedom.
That kind of comeback move is natural given the circumstances, and Greedo's best album, God Level, is a 98-minute epic, so length isn't inherently a hindrance. But at 23 minutes, this month's Another Night Out is the most immersive music he's made since his release. Even as it nods to Tallahassee ("Bossman Flow"), Atlanta ("Sea World Abu Dhabi") and Detroit ("Fetti"), the record is centered and quintessentially Greedo: flow-state rapping possessed with a bluesy, uncanny sense of melody, tumbling through snapping production and burrowing deeper into his distinctly Watts-powered POV. Though the album opens with "Own People," a haunted, mistrustful appraisal of turncoats in his personal life, it is primarily a toast to his emancipation, and the festivity is boosted by the music's economy. It's the sound of a maverick settling in, yet at no point does he overstay his welcome.
There is a concentration across these three albums that goes beyond the runtimes, reflected in the music as if each rapper has adapted to his individual milieu. For Greedo, there is a harmony of sound and subject, in which Another Night Out becomes thematic and his performances embody the turnt-up antics of a night-long bender, the single-scene focus of the title allowing for a deeper exploration of his voice. "She wanna f*** 'cause in my section, I'm somebody," he raps repeatedly on the closer, his singsong hook characteristically lithe and garbled all at once, and that sentiment is imbued in the project's ethos, as if you're sectioned off in VIP with him. Mick Jenkins' patience is clearly paying off, given the increasing edge and perceptivity of his rhymes. Each verse is delivered with the thundering gravitas of a law procedural's closing arguments, and he has come to recognize the inherent value of his commitment to effort.
Live Laugh Love, meanwhile, is the sound of a rapper opening the blackout curtains that have cloaked his music and letting in the sun. The album still has that same density Kgositsile noted in 2018, and it is just as to the point, but the raps aren't shrouded in that air of exclusivity anymore; it may be recherché, but it is also embracing. "They knew shhh was off when I was staying silent and stayed inside / I'm saying sorry for the pain I caused," he raps on "CRISCO," nodding to his reclusive 2015 LP, I Don't Like S***, I Don't Go Outside. "God know my heart and that I'm out here tryna change the course, I'm working on it / Peeling layers off." For each of these artists, you can think of these succinct albums as peeled-off layers: not attempts to inundate or optimize, but to whittle their art down to its core.
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