Album Review: POMPEII // UTILITY by Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE & SURF GANG
A double album built on kinship and SURF GANG drums that dares both fanbases to keep up. It’s the noisiest, most generous thing either rapper has made.
Wiki introduced them in 2016. Earl had already been streaming MIKE’s early Bandcamp tapes from his phone. By 2019, MIKE was on the Fire It Up Tour. By 2020, Earl was on “allstar.” Since then, the two have guested on each other’s records with the regularity of people who don’t need an excuse—just a session and a mic left on. The SURF GANG connection came separately but with the same inevitability: Evilgiane, Harrison, and Eera, a Brooklyn producer collective that started in skate culture and guerrilla shows during COVID lockdowns, eventually placing beats with Kendrick Lamar and Baby Keem. Harrison had already produced for both rappers. Evilgiane had too. Three camps had overlapped so many times that a full album together was less a question of if than of when and how bloated they’d let it get. The answer is 33 tracks, two discs. POMPEII is MIKE’s side, fifteen songs. UTILITY is Earl’s, eighteen. Every beat comes from the SURF GANG roster, with additional contributions from Tony Seltzer and others. Earl was laughing when he told The Face, “The ‘real hip-hop’ fans are about to be off. To some people this might be the weakest shit we’ve ever dropped.”
MIKE’s disc hits the ground mid-stride. “The Fall” has him back East, dismissive of doubters, asking for a worthy opponent, and then the confidence starts sharing space with something grimmer. On “AFRO,” he puts it together in these bars during the hook. Down the line, he raps about feeling grief from his mother’s passing in the verse, then just keeps going. Vacations in Korea, luggage weighed down by heat, strangers hating on the team. Mourning on MIKE’s disc never gets its own silence. It shares a bar with money counting and jet lag and the taste of dope. “Shutter Island” compresses everything into a speed-read of accumulated damage:
“Those crooked slums, a thug’s resort
Hood above, I lust for warmth
Cookie crumbs and buttered torch [….]
They never gave your son a choice.”
Earl’s side is chattier, stranger, funnier. He opens “this2shallpass” announcing “Before we start, let’s get one thing reestablished—it’s only up,” then immediately starts rapping about paper cuts from playing with cash and demons in the chapel, which is a pretty quick backslide from “only up.” On “Charli 2na” he compares himself to the Jurassic 5 MC, rapping “I feel like Charlie 2na, I’m the best one in the group,” and a few bars later admits the bottle bent him out of shape. That specific, unembarrassed honesty about his drinking keeps recurring. On “quikk” he says it plain, “I jumped off the bottle, was drinkin’ too much.” On “:( again :)”: “Drew a line in the sand with a stick/Took account of the damage I did/I decided to man up and fix it.” Earl at thirty-one has stopped burying sobriety talk under six layers of riddle. He still writes in circles when he feels like it, but now you can tell which bars are puzzles and which are just him enjoying his own mouth. On “AOK,” he says he wants his kids, calls the people keeping them from him clowns, and remembers a time when all he wanted was a tub and his pops. On “Sisyphus,” he’s tired:
“It’s been a long day for real
Pushing all this weight uphill
And when the morning came, I slept
Let me fall straight on my head.”
He pokes his bruises and peels off scabs. Life taught him he’s his own protection.
The drums provided by SURF GANG clang with the thin, metallic rattle of a kicked fire escape. Nothing here resembles The Alchemist’s dusty sample flips or the lo-fi murk that colored Some Rap Songs and Tears of Joy. The synths on “React” chirp like corrupted Game Boy cartridges. “Minty” has the fizz of a ringtone vibrating against a subwoofer. The distortion is constant but never uniform; “Home on the Range” lets actual daylight through with a synth line that almost qualifies as pleasant, while “Shutter Island” keeps everything clipped and suffocating. Both rappers adjust to the rougher frequencies. MIKE tightens his fricative count, writes terser bars, dashes through “Da Bid” and “F.E.A.R.” like he’s racing the beat to the end of the measure. Earl gets stringent on “Ew!,” then brags about Onyx Alhambra Van Cleef for his lover and stepping out of ash “like a phoenix or somethin’” (the “or somethin’” tells you he knows how corny it is and doesn’t care).
Jadasea’s verse on “Da Bid” turns inward fast, landing on “Was it love you were sharin’ with me?/...Said a prayer that tomorrow wasn’t seein’,” and Anysia Kym sings about raining on her own parade on “NOT 4TW” with enough gloom to earn the beat switch underneath her. Niontay on “F.E.A.R.” is the wildcard: he calls himself the same size as a pre-teen, claims he’s turning agnostic from getting high, brags about three women in each tour city, and all of it tumbles out akin to reading his own group chat aloud for the first time. Na-Kel Smith, the pro skater from Earl’s Odd Future days, raps on “Back LA” about busting traps to make a million off rap with the relaxed enthusiasm of someone who knows whose album this is. “Leadbelly,” the one song where Earl and MIKE swap bars directly, is the tightest moment on either disc: “I told Twin, ‘you better than me/I still got vendettas to see through.’” Competitive grin fully audible.
And yes—33 tracks is a lot. “Back Home” and “Ew!” barely register as distinct entries, and the middle of Earl’s disc between “quikk” and “Chicago” can lose you if your attention wanders. A tighter edit—24, 25 songs—would’ve hit harder. But the excess isn’t accidental. Earl chose the title UTILITY for social fluidity, for usefulness, for not being pinnable. MIKE described the Warp studio sessions as bodies scattered in corners of a big room, everyone frozen and tired. Someone joked it looked like Pompeii. They wanted the whole mess, not a manicured statement.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “AFRO,” “Kirkland,” “Sisyphus”
Too excited for this