by Elizabeth Braaten (@elizabethbwords)
Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist pleasantly surprised listeners when they dropped new album VOIR DIRE. Fans have been clamoring to listen to the tape for years, ever since Alchemist famously teased the existence of a secret joint album with Earl hidden on YouTube back in 2019. It was worth every second of the wait — VOIR DIRE is one of the best rap albums of the year. The duo’s first joint venture is a no-skips project packed with lustrous beats, plush samples, velvety flows, and Earl’s signature meditative lyricism.
VOIR DIRE marks Earl’s first full-length offering since his acclaimed 2022 album SICK! and follows Alchemist’s 2023 EP Flying High. The project’s release as an NFT was as unconventional as it was unexpected — with the sole exception of the MIKE-featuring track “Sentry,” VOIR DIRE is only available to stream via Gala Music, a new, decentralized listening platform.
While VOIR DIRE is the first full-length collaboration from Earl and Alchemist, the pair have had a working creative relationship for years. Earl featured multiple times on fellow Odd Future member Domo Genesis’ 2012 collaborative mixtape with Alchemist, No Idols, and has teamed up with the producer on numerous occasions since. The chemistry they’ve built over the course of the last decade is the heart and soul of the project — Earl and Alchemist complement each other’s skillsets perfectly, proving they're a match made in rap heaven.
The contemplative first lines of album-opener “100 High Street” (“focus steady and I’m broken”) hook listeners at once, setting the tone perfectly for what’s to come. Raw self-reckoning reigns supreme across the album’s eleven tracks — the thoughtful “Vin Skully” sees Earl coming face-to-face with his past haunts over a soulful, chopped-up vocal loop (“I don’t know what it is, I remember the ghost inside the crib/Hosin’ down the problem with gin and tonic, how to stay afloat in a bottomless pit/The trick is to stop fallin’”). That pensive theme is present in the silky flows of “Sentry” (“memories careen out the past, halt me to a screech in they tracks/had a couple things on my chest, that’s where the demons would sit”) and the thoughtful ruminations on his youth of “Sirus Blac” (“runnin’ with wolves like Karl Towns, used to be on bullshit, bugged out/and the drink was duller than shark feelings”).
Through it all, Earl seems determined to progress, move forward, and heal. He sounds content with stepping into his own on “Mac Deuce'' (“gotta make it home/A baby that I gotta raise”) and emerges victorious from the fire on the heavenly, transcendent “All The Small Things'' (“roll with the punches, keep ‘em comin’, I’m prepared/ I’ma parry somethin’, variables made me bend, but I never fumble, carryin’ it like a man”).
Alchemist’s production skills combined with Earl’s complex rhymes make for a project that is both an ultra-smooth listen and packed to the rafters with emotional depth. Earl Sweatshirt has come a long way since the salad days of OFWGKTA, but one thing is certain: he’s always been an artist willing to embrace the concept of voir dire — old French for “to speak the truth.”