Despite only being in his early 30s, Earl has had a lifetime to work out which countries most appreciate what he does. Bursting into the public consciousness as rap collective Odd Future's 16-year-old wunderkind, his story has become legendary. Sent to a boarding school in Samoa by his concerned mother, he finally returned to release his debut album 'Doris' in 2013, going on to carve out an idiosyncratic path which shunned the commercial mainstream while cementing him as one of hip-hop's most talented and influential figures. Now 32, he cuts an introspective and deeply thoughtful figure – a far cry from his initial public persona as a purveyor of close-to-the-bone horrorcore.

'POMPEII // UTILITY' is structured as a double album, with Earl covering off the 'UTILITY' disc while 'POMPEII' is MIKE's domain. The yin to Earl's yang, MIKE is as prone to laughter as his album-mate is to contemplative silence. Hailed as one of hip-hop's most talented new figures back when he was in his late teens, MIKE quickly gained the attention of his one-time hero Earl and the two have been close friends and collaborators ever since. With the groundwork laid, it's obvious why fans of both rappers have been clamouring for a full-length collaboration from the pair for years. While 'POMPEII // UTILITY' sees their wish fulfilled, the split disc nature of the project means the separation between the two is maintained. In fact, just two tracks across the album's 33 songs feature both Earl and MIKE: 'POMPEII'’s 'Kirkland' and 'UTILITY''s 'Leadbelly'. As you'd expect from two rappers with a reputation for intentionality, this was an entirely conscious decision.

"We're together, but there's space for both of us," says Earl. "I feel like it's the most honest depiction of our thing. We've always been connected, inextricably. But we're still separate for our health. Our relationship is like when trees grow and form a forest canopy. The leaves of each tree don't touch. It's magical, because they're so close that they create the same forest, the same canopy, but they don't quite reach each other – and that's super important for the health of the forest, just like it is for us."

The two-halves nature of the project also reflects the way it came together, with SURF GANG's production acting as a conduit for both MIKE and Earl's work, with each rapper working independently before realising the parallel tracks they were on. 

"My side of things came together over two, three years," explains MIKE. "I linked up with Gianni and Harrison [Evilgiane and Harrison, producers and SURF GANG co-founders] in 2023, and we made 'Minty' and 'Back Home', then we kept linking up and making music as we went along. It was a bit later that I found out that Thebe [Earl] was doing the same thing, so we started playing each other all the SURF GANG tracks we'd been making. Thebe was the one who had the idea of putting these tapes out together in the form it finally took."

This theme of working separately but together is one that percolates through every part of the project, with the separate cover images for each album both being drawn from the same specially commissioned sculpture by Sharif Farrag, a close friend of Earl's. Likewise, the split titles of 'POMPEII' and 'UTILITY', while initially very separate concepts, intersect in ways that aren't immediately obvious.

"'POMPEII' was originally just a reference to everybody being clapped in the studio," says MIKE. "They were all frozen like the people of Pompeii. But as we got closer to releasing, I think I realised that it's more a reference to the freeze frame and the capturing of a moment in both its beauty and its destruction. Because that's what an album is – it's the beauty of actually capturing a moment which usually escapes you."

"For me, there's also a utility to destruction," says Earl. "'UTILITY' is in part about functionality, applicability. I've started a new process where I limit the amount I listen to beats if I'm not going to follow through. I wouldn't open a beat unless I was going to finish the song right there.

"I was also thinking about the relationship between words like functionality and utility, utility and ease. They beget each other – in a feng shui sense, clutter is super detrimental to your mental health, so you've got to strip away everything that doesn't have utility for you. I've been exploring that in my life and thinking about the utility of destruction and how to break down and re-form myself for whatever task is at hand.

"The link with 'POMPEII' is super obvious to me," he continues. "I live in LA, and that shit was just on fire! But after it's on fire, after it's destroyed, what happens? People come and work on it and rebuild it. That's all you can do."

It's indicative of both MIKE and Earl's approach that there can be so much unpacking to be done from just the name of an album. More than that, though, it points to a 360-degree way of thinking about music. From the album art to the title to the tracks themselves, there's hardly an aspect of this project which the two haven't had an input on. SURF GANG's involvement on the production and beats is therefore a ceding of control which could be uncomfortable, but both MIKE and Earl are relatively relaxed about it – or trying to be, at least.

"I've been practising letting go of control," says MIKE with a laugh. "I am super controlling with my music usually, so it's hard. I think I'm just anxious as fuck in life generally, which means I'm always premeditating everything and that bleeds into the way I make music. So in life I'm trying to allow things to be how they are, and I realised that naturally I have to battle that within the music as well."

Earl, on the other hand, is less conflicted. "Dude, hell yeah!" he says, when asked if he's happy to cede control of production. "There's a rapper mode that you go into when you have producers, that's really important. I'm in there, and I'm totally focused on rapping. I'm not splitting my attention or trying to be Quincy Jones, playing around with the bass while also trying to rap. Instead, I get to go in there and just play my instrument, which for me is my rapping."

Despite this level of comfort with letting SURF GANG handle the production, Earl has previously said that some fans of his might be surprised at the instrumentals, which act as the bedrock of 'POMPEII // UTILITY', with the jazz-flecked vibe he's become known for being replaced with a more electronic sound. 

"Duuude," he groans when we bring this up. "Please can what I'm about to say get clipped and farmed and short contented in the same way as that quote did – I fucked up! I brought the ghost into the conversation by saying that, because it wasn't there. I conjured the hypothetical by suggesting people might have an issue. These fucking zombies got the validation of me looking directly at them, and now I have to deal with that. Rule one of show business – don't break that fourth wall."

It may be amplified for comic effect, but grappling with outside responses to their songs is something both MIKE and Earl have thought about a lot. The solitary, diaristic act of writing songs which often touch on deeply personal subject matter is in stark contrast with the other part of their job – walking out on stage and saying those words in front of thousands of people. "I just have to say, 'Fuck it, I'm gonna deal with this later!'" laughs Mike. "But it's good to be able to stand on your emotions, too. How you feel, how you see life, those things shouldn't just be internal; they should hold up in front of those crowds. I'm a shy person, but as long as you're being intentional and you're trying to do something positive, people resonate with that. If you're not trying to do something good, what's our purpose, you know?"

"It is insane, bro," agrees Earl. "I've spent a long time having to deal with myself and the spotlight. I phrase making music as mining myself, because it houses all the beauty and destruction that comes from mining. I'm digging deep holes into the earth to bring out shiny things for other people.

"I think me and MIKE have both been trying to say some sort of a version of what I'm about to say for years, but the point keeps getting missed, and it keeps descending into divisiveness. The point is that a lot of lines are drawn to separate people, so you really have to look at what's happening to you and who's trying to section you off. They probably do not have your best interests at heart, so if making a connection with those crowds helps to avoid that… This is just a long way of saying: fuck all that shit.

"We're young Black dudes, and this is our Black music, and we love y'all. That's it. And look, we just dropped fucking gas! I know how good this album is; that shit is hard, so whoever wants to argue this or that about it, I literally love you. I love people, I love music. They try to convince you that hate matters, but it doesn't."

Wrapped up in this desire to unify and break down boundaries is both Earl and MIKE's background as children of the diaspora with feet in more than one culture. Earl's father is South African, while MIKE's family is Jamaican, and his own childhood saw him move between New Jersey, England, Philadelphia and New York. This mixed cultural background can bring with it a sense of rootlessness or not entirely fitting into any one place. On the flipside of that, both MIKE and Earl credit it with shaping their outlook on life and their desire to build their own communities.

"I think we're trying to restore the energy of lineage through music," says MIKE. "Whether that's through your actual blood or through the people who have grown to become your family. I moved to New York in 2013, and a lot of my friends that I had from high school I still know today. If I plan on staying in New York, those people are going to be around me for the rest of my life, so that's my chosen family. That makes me think of how we build things up – we can't change the past, but we can try and gear the future towards being a better thing."

"When you say community to me, I feel like that can be a scary word," adds Earl. "We've seen a lot of communities go to shit – I'm 30-something, and there's a lot of 'community' in your 20s which burns out and disenchants people, because there's no nucleus to that community. 

"After my pops died, I asked my mom: 'Was y'all ever friends?' and I kind of knew what the answer was going to be while I was looking at her. She said they weren't, but they were comrades for a cause. That's beautiful, but I just feel like shit has to be simple at the nucleus. The community me and MIKE have built is lasting because at the core, there's this real friendship." He gestures at MIKE. "I fuck with that dude; he's like my little brother. None of this is a means to an end – that's the key.

"The African American experience," he continues. "It leaves you a little bit… a little bit peculiar. It's a strange mixture of cultures, with the 80s and 90s in Africa and then the early 2000s in America. That makes a really distinct kind of person, but there's a lot of us out there. I feel like it's some X-Men shit. I make music, and I'm saying 'Yo, we're here, you're here, we're good – don't kill yourself!'"

"We were talking about this recently," adds MIKE. "I think one of the most important things for us as Black people is taking over a space and understanding that once you have a space, you can manifest something from that space. We've built a community on tour where I don't even have to tell people off anymore! Someone will step out of line, but somebody else will be pulling them back before I even say anything. I'm so grateful for that.

"It's easy to be under the illusion of dividing musicians from fans, but being a fan is the same energy as being an artist. You've got to snap people out of that crazy fan persona – one day they could make music, and I'll be in the crowd, because I'm a fan too, we're a family. There are people who have grown up alongside me. They were coming to see me when I was 21, and they're coming now I'm 27. For someone who's used to moving around a lot and not knowing people for too long, that's a crazy thing."

Focusing on the positivity of fans might seem easy to do, especially the day after an album launch, where people queued for hours just to see MIKE and Earl play. Likewise, both rappers are critical darlings, with their unique sound and flow attracting plaudits from basically every publication going. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever entered into the court of public opinion will know, negativity can make a far deeper impression than positivity if you let it.

"Your own brain amplifies that shit," acknowledges Earl. "It's been fucking frying me! I have to constantly remind myself that it's like four dudes bitching online and I'm letting it eclipse those thousands of smiling faces coming to see us every time we play. Maybe three times a week, a motherfucker comes up to me and is like 'Bro, you saved my life' and I'll be like" - he waves dismissively - "I'm busy right now, this dude online thinks one of my songs isn't very good."

"I think it can hit so hard because our songs are us," says MIKE. "I was saying this yesterday about people separating the art from the artists – any artist will tell you that art and artists are the same thing, because our life and our art are so parallel.

"Even for people like Kanye West, we have to know what happened there, and we can't separate him from his art. Everybody was loving the super sexy ass music until they realised there was freaky stuff happening! But you see it in the club when people are having too much fun to realise they're overstepping. You have to see these things go up and then crash back down to realise that everything shiny isn't gold. This is a person who's going through psychosis, a person who was already not afraid to say whatever he wanted to say, but we as a society have smoked our brains so much that we think that means he's a genius. He's not a genius, he's just arrogant, but people love that."

Broader than individual artists and their relationships with their music and their fans, concepts of fear and demonisation are subjects that Earl has touched on in the runup to the release of 'POMPEII // UTILITY'. At a Q+A session to celebrate the album launch, he mused on there being no concept of hell in African religions, while the very first line on 'POMPEII // UTILITY' is "Some people might say that you are the devil".

"Black people have been demonised," he explains. "Our gods, our skin, everything. We've been attached to negativity, criminality, darkness – but that shit is not real unless you let it convince you that it is. Motherfuckers online are trying to lie these things into existence, and then the artificial world they've created is scaring them. It's fucking weird.

"African civilisations were cognisant of what we now know as quantum science thousands of years ago. We got called primitive while we waited for motherfuckers to catch up with us, and all they've done is make Lovecraftian chatbots that use up all the world's water. It's crazy that we're going to have Mad Max-style water wars because people are using up all the water making pictures of Martin Luther King standing in front of a Dodge Challenger!

"'The devil', as it were, is just a representation of fear. The devil is not creative. The devil is not even a thing, but to use an Abrahamic example, it's just saying: 'Nice crucifix, would be a shame if somebody were to… flip it upside down!' It's mockery, but it's not creative. Negative energy and fear are needy. They need you to see them as all-encompassing, because that's the only power they have. But I refuse to have that existential fear. I'm African-ly underwhelmed and I'm just disappointed in all of it. The world is weird, silly and horrible, but I don't have existential fear because I have a different understanding of life."

"I think the most important thing is that we actually be with the people," says MIKE. "The internet gives a fake barrier where people feel like they don't have to live in the same society that everybody else is living in. We all have to exist in this shit, so why not make it a better place to be? What I hope for is that we can enter back into a world where people take the time to think things through and be a bit more sensitive again. To take it back to music, what I hope people take away from this is that once you listen to a track, you're part of this world. Being a listener or being a speaker, it's all important, it's all beautiful."

"Yeah, just explore the fuck out of yourself," adds Earl. "Don't be afraid to do some new shit and just understand that you are never going to be separated from yourself. No matter how far you go, you're still going to bring you to everything." ■

Taken from the May 2026 issue of Dork. Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE and SURF GANG's double album 'POMPEII // UTILITY' is out now.