On Silver Vinyl

Collaborative album Voir Dire pairs The Alchemist's soul-sampling, mellow roasted production with Earl Sweatshirt's lucid dreaming flows, an unlikely but surprisingly complementary match. Earl's 2018 album Some Rap Songs changed certain sectors of hip hop forever with its fragmented production and fever dream rhymes, pioneering a sound that didn't quite fit into lofi circles but was more alien than almost any other album that made it to the top 20 of that year's Billboard charts. His work since has been just as experimental if not more, so it's almost a shock to hear him on Alchemist's relatively tame beats like "Mac Deuce" or the synthy R&B loop of "Heat Check." If anything, Voir Dire proves that Earl can shine in any context, bringing an inventive, circuitous diagram of rhymes to Alchemist's deep-groove riffs on "Vin Skully" and transforming the straightforward gospel pianos and bumpy drums of "Mancala" (one of two tracks on the project featuring Vince Staples) into something puzzlingly cerebral. MIKE brings out even more of Earl's cryptographic rap tendencies when they duet with head-spinning bars on "Sentry." Voir Dire pushes the bounds of both Alchemist's old school warmth and Earl's heady verses, landing someplace new that neither would have gotten to on their own.

100 High Street 1:35
Vin Skully 1:51
Sentry 2:20
All The Small Things 1:58
My Brother, The Wind 2:07
27 Braids 2:04
Mac Deuce 2:07
Sirius Blac 2:18
Geb 2:46
Dead Zone 3:39
Free The Ruler 2:25