The collaborative album between rapper Earl Sweatshirt and producer the Alchemist,Voir Dire marks the pair’s first full-length project. 

After an odd album release cycle beginning with the Alchemist teasing the album’s existence under fake accreditation on YouTube and ending with a release to streaming on Oct. 6, Voir Dire follows a similar template and style as the previous few Earl Sweatshirt projects. The songs rarely crack three minutes of length, the production uses repetitive looping samples from numerous sources and Earl, himself, moves away from the energetic, acrobatic flow he mastered on his first couple of albums in favor of a steady, monotone flow.

The Alchemist’s contribution to the album seemingly manifests as more melodic samples and instrumental elements into the song mixes. This adds a richer, more varied sound palette to the album and provides a nice change of pace after the dusty, crackling noises of Some Rap Songs and the modernized but slightly generic beats of SICK! 

The classic soul samples prove beautiful, and Earl capitalizes on them with his usual verbose rapping style. Earl manages to weave many lyrical ideas together with a deceptively straightforward delivery style. The only two features, MIKE and Vince Staples, do certainly have some standout moments where they change up the album’s bag of tricks, but for the most part, Earl proves comfortable taking on entire songs by himself. The album is packed full of introspective bars about struggling with his position inside the rap game and his continuing issues with addiction and depression.

In the song “Vin Skully,” standout lyrics talk about “hosin’ down the problem with gin and tonic” alongside references to the parody movie “Walk Hard.” In the song, Earl raps about the movie’s story of addiction and takes accompanying samples from the film. This recurring topic is addressed in between songs like “All the Small Things,” where he laments over how the modern world quickly consumes and discards art. He finishes the song by talking about how if you “embed it with gold – it’s gon’ never get old,” a powerful moment for an album that definitely seems more focused on quality over quantity. 

Less about how explosively he can deliver lines or how lavishly produced his songs are, Earl’s new music showcases new concepts he works in among his usual ideas and how effectively he can render them lyrically among unobtrusive music. On those terms, Voir Dire stands as an agreeable addition to the artist’s catalog, even if his current intentionally repetitive style proves less interesting as time goes on. The Alchemist’s production contributions provide a slightly new flavor in the formula to spice things up on this project, but in many ways, it’s still more of the same, which might not be a bad thing depending on the listener’s appetite for the style.

3.5 failed YouTube sleuths out of 5