Earl Sweatshirt’s earliest memories are listening to jazz in Chicago

Earl Sweatshirt’s latest album, Live, Laugh, Love, released August 22, 2025, pulses with emotional honesty and evocative texture. Clocking in at just over 24 minutes, it’s a flurry of fragmented memories, warm-yet-fractured lyricism, and beats that feel like downtown jazz softened by sleepiness—but carrying that simmering tension just beneath the surface.

Those sensory memories—of jazz drifting through a Chicago apartment and the striking smell of rain on metal—aren’t mere lyrical flourishes. Captured in a recent New York Times Popcast, they felt deeply rooted. Speaking with Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli “Either being on the rug and hearing some jazz in Chicago in the apartment… or going down the slide… the smell… the metal… it was wet—super visceral.”

They anchor his creative world the way a jazz standard’s rhythm anchors a solo riff. Earl’s music isn’t overtly jazzy, but the echoes are unmistakable—in the spacious beat edits, the sonic fragmentation, the way emotion blooms from texture as much as words.

On Live, Laugh, Love, producer Theravada—who recorded some tracks after pickup basketball sessions—offers scrappy soul loops and ragged bounce that vibrate with that same tactile quality. Earl’s voice floats over it all, loose, playful, and precise—like a horn player doubling on dissonance and melody.

Moreover, Earl’s evolution from teenage Odd Future prodigy to present-day family man reverberates with that Chicago tension: rooted in a place, transformed by memory, bending irony into sincerity. He joked that if “Live, Laugh, Love” used to read like a middle‑America cliche, parenthood made it real rather than meme.

It’s Chicago as sensory springboard—where early jazz, rain-slick metal, and early childhood intimacy colored his creative palette. And it’s an influence that, decade later, shapes how he builds atmosphere, arranges narrative fragments, and constructs spacious, emotionally dense rap compositions.

Stream Live Laugh Love on Apple Music and Spotify, or visit Earl Sweatshirt’s website and Instagram for more information.