Earl Sweatshirt on Truth speaking and intuition in creativity

 Sunday, September 28th, 2025

    Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, better known by his stage name Earl Sweatshirt, is a rapper and producer who was raised in Los Angeles, where he found his footing in the underground rap scene with the group known as Odd Future. The rapper's first album, self-titled Earl, is a far cry from his music today, but what each piece in Earl’s discography shares is a reliance on the absolute and sometimes brutal truth and intuitive creation in his creative process. 

    Earl released his debut album, self-titled “Earl,” at just 16, which quickly gained a cult following in the underground rap scene. Shortly after, Earl was sent away to Samoa by his mother for what he describes as “behavioral issues”. After coming back, Earl felt the pressure of fans who expected an equally angsty and vulgar album, mirroring his debut release. Instead, they got Doris, my favorite of his albums and one of the most emotionally vulnerable hip-hop releases of this generation. This album showcased Earl’s deeply intricate lyrical talent while maintaining a raw and intimate storytelling component. Reflecting on his time away, Earl said in an interview that “As a kid, and when I went away and sh-t, a thing that I had to fight for was my sense of self and my own voice”. In this album, Earl describes songs like “Chum” as allowing him to articulate his feelings in a way that he otherwise couldn’t. The content of the song involves raw emotional testaments about Earl’s troubled past, which involved struggling with horrible slumps of depression, loss, and the pitfalls that accompanied early stardom.

 

    In an interview with Rolling Stone, the rapper shared that he once scrapped a 19-track album. While he emphasized the amount of work he put in, he felt that the process of creating it felt manufactured or inauthentic in a way. For Earl, music involves “grading things on the truth, however expensive the truth is”, and whether it is succumbing to outside input or to your own expectations of a project, if the process of constructing an album wasn’t reliant on personal truth, it wouldn’t work. This level of vulnerability attracts a diverse range of fans to his music, even though they may not have been present for his experiences. Listening to an album like Doris makes it abundantly clear how sincere the work is, and this sincerity makes it that much more interesting to hear.  

'Doris' - Earl Sweatshirt

   

    Earl’s writing process relies almost exclusively on intuition and feeling to achieve truth in his music.  Rather than having a strict creative process Earl describes that while writing and recording he is “not f–king with it if it doesn’t put itself together, because that's when you know something else is guiding the music y’know.” The sort of intuitive creative process Earl is describing here is what is known in psychology as insight, where ideas seem to emerge from the subconscious almost randomly in the form of an “aha moment.” When someone experiences this, as he describes, it feels as though something else is guiding the music —a higher, creative force. 

    Critics of his second release sighted the work as “incohesive” although technically brilliant. For a listener like me, though, this lack of cohesion seems to manifest as feeling more authentic and novel, like a sort of vision quest where intricate planning is replaced by intuitive creation based on deeply emotional subjects. In the book “Faith, Hope, and Carnage”, which details an interview with musician Nick Cave, there is a similar emphasis on letting the process of recording and writing take you somewhere unplanned and mysterious. Cave describes this process as “surrender(ing) in a way and really just let(ting) yourself be led by the secret demands of the song.” For Earl, surrendering means not being influenced by a specific vision for the end product and instead creating based on intuition and truth-speaking, which can only come as a byproduct of relying on his unique mental and emotional states at the time of writing.