Welcome To Lucid Nap Time With Earl & MIKE

Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE are two of the best, most consistent lyricists of the 2020s, but they’ve never been pretentious enough to try proving it — at least, not outside their individual albums.

Fans got their latest reminder when the two pulled up for a mid Hot 97 freestyle last week. Posted up in the hallowed realm of elite spitters past and present, Earl approached his live rhyme session with all the enthusiasm of a mid-hangover conversation with your badass little nephew. MIKE gave it a spirited go, but his laconic tone and counterintuitive flow weren’t fit for the majesty of peak Roc-A-Fella Records beats.

People waiting to say these guys are mid got their lame-ass takes off, and I was a little disappointed. But I also knew Black Thought impressions were never the point for my favorite sleepyheads. In a land of rap formalism, where punchlines punctuate meaning with exclamation points, Earl and MIKE suffocate with ellipses and camouflaged agility. Linking with the production team Surf Gang, they do a little of that on Pompeii // Utility, a joint album that somehow makes me want to eat an edible and decipher their Genius pages like they're The Da Vinci Code.

When Earl and MIKE announced their joint double album last month, it honestly felt like something that should’ve happened a long time ago. The two rappers have been tapped in with each other for almost a decade, and their brands of drowsy, fragmented lyricism are stylistic cousins. Here, they’re supposed to complement each other, with each emcee taking the spotlight for one of the two discs. Paired with Surf Gang’s muted plugg soundscapes, we get flashes of virtuosity; their sly wordplay can color subdued production like neon chalk on the blacktop. But the ambient beats can also make things feel too monochromatic, particularly when MIKE’s on the mic.

Holding things down for the Pompeii end of things, MIKE sounds like he’s in his natural habitat, traversing Surf Gang beats with the ease and instinctive comfort of a midnight cruise down the block, with only his thoughts to keep his company. The effortlessness disguises the technique. “MY WORST (rebuke)” sounds like he just woke up from a hibernation, but then he rhymes words that sound like “numerate” for a scheme that lasts a whole verse, and you realize you’re the one that’s been sleeping. There’s even some surprising bite: “Won't be me on that shirt, it'll be you in it.”

Even though he’s in cruise control, MIKE’s too deep a guy and too interesting a poet for the project to be devoid of profundity. For tracks like “Shutter Island,” he jogs across a wispy tightrope of internal rhyme schemes, esoteric symbolism, and emotional multitudes with pristine economy of motion: “Money pirate, jump aboard/ Stomach grinding, butterflies/ I couldn't die, just nothing more/ Muddy diamonds rupture core/ Courage strike from luck ignored/ Push yourself if you 'bout your force.”

Throughout the project, MIKE continues rejecting the notion of enunciation. If you’re not a MIKE fan, that could get annoying. But his cotton-mouthed delivery has the intentional or unintentional effect of making his bars more impressionistic, and mixed with the misty ambiance of his beats, successive songs can become trance-inducing. Trying to solve the micro-riddles of his bars can pull you out of the malaise enough to make Pompeii pretty engaging at its best. Yet the tones and tempos of the first eight tracks on the project fold into his voice so monotonously, you might not be excited enough to make it to the best parts of Pompeii in the first place. You might just skip to Utility. 

While their styles mirror one another somewhat, Earl’s voice isn’t so deep that it’s asphyxiated by Surf Gang’s aqueous basslines, and that makes his raps more immediately legible. It also helps that Earl is possibly the best rapper alive, and a masterful slick talker. For tracks like “Again,” he swirls themes of personal growth and dismissive shit talk in a liquid dance: “I'm all out of paper, so niggas sad/ Too much pape' comin' in to go tit for tat/ That shit made us giggle, I'll give you that/ I usually pay to watch niggas act.” Reading the lyrics, you can feel the condescension like it’s braille, but it feels like his heartbeat doesn’t rise above 60. Think Goku making Jeice and Burter look helpless. 

Earl puts on similar exhibitions on “Hot Water” and “Again,” threading bursts of free-associative wordplay that ricochet off each other like stray bullets. He’s probably the only rapper besides billy woods that could squeeze Stephen A. Smith and Stevie Nicks references into the same eight-bar stretch where you can also find a word like “spigot.” “Chali 2na” is a delirious little vocal and sonic experiment. It would've been cool to see Veeze tap in with Earl for that one. It would’ve been even cooler for MIKE to tap in with Earl more in general. 

Both halves are good, but I’d say the album’s biggest problem is more what it wasn’t than what it was. We get two decent projects from Earl and MIKE separately, but after their years of building chemistry, they would’ve been better suited linking up together for a 45-minute actual joint album instead of a Speakerboxxx/The Love Below where there’s barely a difference between Speakerboxxx and The Love Below. They’re at their best on “Leadbelly,” teaming up to lace a Tony Seltzer co-produced track with alternating two to eight-bar verses that gives this mammoth release a fleeting sense of propulsion. 

Speaking with VIBE, MIKE said he and Earl came up with the name Pompeii when they and their collaborators were exhausted after a long, hard day’s work in the studio. It’s fitting for a project that manages to be nearly as skillful as it is lethargic. Maybe they should’ve worked together more. Maybe they ought to experiment with vocal delivery. Or maybe that dozed-off aesthetic is just a side effect of making things look too easy.

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