Earl Sweatshirt’s new album, “Some Rap Songs,”is a challenging but compelling project where he sheds all pretenses of making commercial music and takes his rightful place as the spiritual successor of rap’s early 2000’s underground legends, like MF Doom and Eminem pre-Slim Shady LP. The sparse beat work provides listeners with an extended peek into his mind, and his raps are some of the best of his generation. This feels like a record that Earl made for himself, and it won’t be for everyone, but his fans are in for one of the best records of the year.

        The most remarkable thing about this album isn’t what it has—it’s what it doesn’t have. There are no choruses on this album to speak of, no EDM style drops, no ad-libs and no guest features. The instrumentals that do appear on this record consist of a basic musical idea, maybe a Madlib style old TV clip, looped until the end of the song. Some of these beats can be pleasant to listen to, like the album’s instrumental closer “Riot!,” which acts like the end credits for the album, but they function mainly as a canvas for Earl to paint with his rhymes. True to the title, these are some rap songs, and the selling point of the album is the rapping.

       Fortunately, rapping is what Earl Sweatshirt does best. When he’s on his game, Earl’s lyricism is unmatched in the current hip-hop landscape, and these are some of his tightest bars since his debut mixtape, 2010’s “Earl.” While “Some Rap Songs” sacrifices a lot of that mixtape’s more ambitious lyrics in service of telling a story, there are certainly some mind-blowing lyrics to be had, like “the boy been gone a few summers too long from road runnin’, trunk full of old hunnids, of course, my old lover was scored, we grow from it,” off of “Cold Summers.”

      Earl has a command over the English language that few, if any, rappers can measure up to, and the key word for “Some Rap Songs” appears to be brevity. In an interview with Vulture, Earl says that he was dedicated to brevity on this record, and very conscious of not over-rapping. That shows, as it clocks in at only 25 minutes for 15 tracks, and yet he manages to tell a story that would take a lesser rapper hours to tell.

      The theme that runs throughout “Some Rap Songs” is escaping the paranoia and anxieties that come from being famous and being with one’s family. The only line that gets repeated on multiple songs, “Shattered Dreams” and “Red Water,” is a variation on the phrase “I didn’t know I could leave.” This is likely in reference to Earl’s visit to South Africa to be with his family earlier this year. On the emotional climax of the record, “Playing Possum”, Earl takes a step back as his parents recite one of his father’s poems, though his father reportedly did not know he would be on the album. The album was finished before his father passed away, but his father’s influence and the estranged relationship he had with Earl run throughout the record

       This album won’t be for everyone. The mixing is mediocre with a layer of fuzz and distortion over the first half of the album that is reminiscent of his former groupmate Tyler The Creator’s worst album, 2015’s “Cherry Bomb.” It will also likely require multiple listens to fully comprehend the lyrics, as well as a trip to Rap Genius. Those who put in the effort, though, will be rewarded with some of the best lyrics and storytelling of any rap record this past decade.