REVIEW: Earl Sweatshirt - Live Laugh Love

Low-key and locked-in, Thebe Kgositsile is in his prime.

24:08 // August 22nd, 2025 // Tan Cressida

Thebe Kgositsile's career shouldn't need much of a recap—it has already been psychoanalyzed ad nauseam by his faithful army of Genius scholars (see: a gaggle of a hundred fuckin' thousand kids), who, as of 24 hours after the release of Live Laugh Love, have already combed through and annotated almost every lyric to extract the most obscure nuance and cultural reference out of bars that would pass most of us by with the same sort of lackadaisical ease they are delivered with. But for the sake of posterity, when Some Rap Songs came out in 2018, it marked a cosmic shift in Kgositsile's career, both stylistically and spiritually. The depressive undertones that made 2015's I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside so requisite for an angry 21-year-old were swapped out for an esoteric haze (inspired heavily by his time hanging out with MIKE and Sixpress) and a new approach to lyricism that felt more like a journey of self-reflection than a mirror of external hostility, thus Earl Sweatshirt became Thebe.

Newly freed from Columbia Records and determined not to fall into complacency, he quickly followed this shift in direction with Feet Of Clay one year later, and then SICK! after another three. These projects both stand on their own with a few golden cuts to their respective names, but they also seamlessly dragged out the status quo of Kgositsile's new identity as established on Some Rap Songs and cemented the idea that Earl Sweatshirt was settling into a comfort zone with diminishing returns. 2023's VOIR DIRE, despite its distinction as a strict collaborative effort with producer The Alchemist, felt much the same.

But something about Live Laugh Love feels different. Maybe it's just the surprise drop that gives it an aura of nonchalant mystique (much to the same effect of Some Rap Songs' purposeful downplaying of its content—like, chill out y'all, it's no big deal); maybe it's the fact that its tongue-in-cheek title—a mantra often spouted ironically to mock the home décor taste of suburban boomers—feels unironically genuine. Now 31 years old with a wife and two kids in tow, the portrait of the artist is completely at ease in his own abode. Perhaps it’s real joy that is beginning to leak into his music.

Sonically, Live Laugh Love still functions under the same umbrella of chopped-up sample loops and rhythmic obfuscation that was developed across Kgositsile's previous four releases, but the energy is notably warmer here. In the first verse of the opening track, "gsw vs sac", Kgositsile sounds like he is welling up with laughter as he references a quote from a friend and turns basketball plays into mythical allusions, cutting the perfect balance between literary chops and hotknife cultural intuition. The song then goes on to feature a rant from comedian The Mandal Man, in which he chastises Kgositsile for chasing the temporal aspects of life ("You wanna chase instead of find, that's your problem. You waitin' on a hurricane. Honestly, you waitin' on Uber Eats too 'cause you, you always orderin' that") before expressing some sage wisdom in the form of tough love ("all that chasin' gon' keep you runnin'. And you ain't runnin' from nowhere but your own self. And that's where you exactly need to be, ain't that crazy?"). In a youtube interview with the same comedian, The Mandal Man asks Kgositsile what he's been up to now that he's older that he wouldn't have been doing when he was younger, and Kgositsile replies, "Probably just... chilling." It's really no surprise that Live Laugh Love comes across as the rapper’s most inviting and content record to date.

A lot of that aforementioned warmth comes equally from Kgositsile's own front as the friendly, lethargic philosopher (see the sixth track "Live" for a masterclass in mumbled ruminations) as it does from the crackling beats and kicked-back basslines of the production. Theravada—whose dominant presence over half of the credit roll really aids the overall cohesion of the project—brings a nice touch to Kgositsile's sonic universe by way of a fun attention to detail, like the motorcycle drive-by on "FORGE" as Kgositsile raps "Stick along for the ride", or the way the instrumental shifts pitch and warbles ever so slightly on "INFATUATION" during a bar about "the space-time continuum bend", not to mention the discombobulated bongo rhythm of "Gamma (need the <3)" or the melancholic soul of the ever effective album highlight "TOURMALINE", which also features a rare taste of melodic crooning from Kgositsile himself (something I would love to hear more of in the future). The back half is mostly supported by the production efforts of Navy Blue, Black Noi$e, and Child Actor, although they all tend to tap into a similar energy without a hitch. One of my favourite late highlights has to be the joint effort between Kgositsile and Navy Blue on "exhaust", which has the perfect amount of reflective whimsy to carry the record off like a ship of smoke into the night [insert Gandalf pipe scene here].

Sitting at a lean 24 minutes, the brevity of Live Laugh Love, ironically, pulls it in line with those same temporal satisfactions that The Mandal Man advises us to stop chasing in the first track. It materializes like a cool breeze in a heatwave and dissipates just as fast, but if you stop to take it in, you may get more out of the experience than a mere distraction. Live Laugh Love does ultimately continue to rehash some aging ideas, but its subtle shift in energy pays dividends. This is the most low-key and locked-in Earl Sweatshirt has sounded in a minute, and it is perhaps his first release in the past six years that might be able to escape the meteoric crater of Some Rap Songs and achieve equal staying power in his discography.

7.5/10