Earl Sweatshirt Drops Surprise Album via Gala Music

For years the rumor swirled, stoked sometimes by the artists it involved: there existed a secret, never-before-heard album from the rappers Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist, and it hid in plain sight. As of midnight, the album isn’t solely confirmed to exist; it’s now accessible to stream and personal through Gala Music.  

Previous to tonight’s shock announcement, Earl—the one-time precocious teenage collaborator of Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean—final formally spoke of the album in 2021, when he informed followers that it had lengthy since been posted to YouTube with a burner account, the place it featured an elaborately crafted pretend album title, cowl, and tracklist. Followers searched desperately for the work; it was by no means discovered. 

Lots of people—even those that spent untold months trawling YouTube’s 800 million uploads for a video supposedly identifiable solely by its lack of reference to Earl Sweatshirt—questioned whether or not the album even actually existed. However that thriller was type of the purpose, or no less than part of the purpose. In Earl-World, goal reality is commonly elusive.

The artist’s songs have lengthy defied categorization, flipping from deceptively humorous to unexpectedly miserable on a dime; his distinctive lyrics, densely packed poetic musings, assemble vividly summary visible collages that resist literal interpretation. As a performer, Earl employs layer upon layer of deadpan and irony. He’s at all times in on some form of joke; his loyal followers are sometimes left hoping that they’re, too. 

So final week, when a collection of cryptic clues began dropping from the sky, seemingly teasing the ever-elusive Earl/Alchemist album, the primary response of many followers was warning. Earl was embarking on a mad-dash, weeklong worldwide tour to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of his first album, “Doris.”

QR codes on the again of value tags for the tour’s merch directed individuals to a web site known as Gala, the place a screenshot of a tweet from The Alchemist learn: “SPEAK THE TRUTH.” The Earl Sweatshirt subreddit blew up in a speculative frenzy, however guarded skepticism prevailed.

“I simply don’t need to get my hopes up,” one person wrote.

Gala Music is an NFT-backed, decentralized streaming platform—so theoretically, new music may very well be coming. However Earl hated NFTs. Or, didn’t he? One Reddit person swore that again in 2022, at a live performance in Denver, he had heard Earl announce a plan to drop 10,000 R&B NFTs. However the person wasn’t positive he hadn’t hallucinated the comment; additional, most followers agreed that if the remark had been made, it was actually a joke. Earl would by no means really contact the blockchain.

“Study what sarcasm is bro. It will aid you in life,” one commenter chided.

However the clues stored raining down. On the first cease of Earl’s “Doris” tour, in downtown Los Angeles, followers discovered extra mysterious QR codes, taped in all places, that they may scan to obtain free live performance posters. Over half of the present’s 2,000 attendees did so. These posters led again to the Gala web site as soon as once more (music.gala.com/hahaha), which now featured riddles that, if answered appropriately, provided entry to a number of extra imprecise posts, together with allusions to the authorized phrase “Voir Dire” and GPS coordinates to a jazz venue in London. 

Over the following 4 days, at “Doris” anniversary live shows in Chicago and New York, the thriller continued to unfurl—extra posters and extra clues. On Monday, a efficiently solved crossword puzzle revealed a observe checklist for an album known as “Voir Dire,” apparently cementing its existence. However by that time, the foreplay was changing into excruciating for some.

“Proof or fuck off NOW,” one Earl fan begged in exasperation.

Earl, for his half, wasn’t serving to when it comes to readability. In direction of the tip of the LA live performance, which featured extended cameos from “Doris” collaborators together with Tyler, the Creator and Vince Staples, The Alchemist took the stage to delirious applause. Maybe the 2 may tackle the hubbub? No; The Alchemist approached Earl silently with a big cake, let Earl blow out the candles, after which walked promptly again off stage, grinning, with out uttering a single phrase.

The panic lastly cleared at midnight ET right this moment, when all the 11-track “Voir Dire” album—sure, the exact same secretly crafted years in the past by Earl and The Alchemist—dropped on Gala, the place it’s going to stream solely.

The 4,000-something concertgoers who scanned QR codes this week to nab “Doris” posters will quickly discover out, in the event that they haven’t already, that they now maintain wallets on Gala, which every comprise a restricted version NFT of a “Voir Dire” observe. A complete of 1,000 NFTs exist for every observe, including as much as 11,000 total—just a few greater than Earl supposedly promised final yr in Denver. 

Any NFTs unclaimed by scavenger hunt contributors are set to go on sale right this moment for $225 apiece, though anybody with a free Gala account can stream the album with out shopping for it.

House owners of “Voir Dire” NFTs can use them to earn rewards on Gala, by pairing the on-chain digital tracks with a node that may stream the songs to the lots through Gala’s decentralized person community. Gala rewards can now be exchanged for quite a few dwell experiences, together with that includes in one in all Earl’s music movies, FaceTiming him and The Alchemist, or probably (pending some authorized readability) getting smoked out by the duo. 

It’s unknown to what diploma Earl’s fanbase will interact with Gala’s tokenized ecosystem. But when they need to hearken to “Voir Dire,” there’s just one place they will go to listen to the entire thing. A single from the album, “Sentry,” that includes the rapper Mike, dropped right this moment on conventional streaming platforms.

That kind of direct engagement with mass audiences is uncommon within the ecosystem of crypto-backed media enterprises, which have struggled in the previous few years to onboard customers past the insulated bubble of die-hard decentralization fanatics. 

Gala Head of Partnerships Julian Khalifa, who helped launch the “Voir Dire” collaboration, sees the experiment as one thing of a path ahead for crypto-affiliated media tasks trying to make a fabric influence on mass tradition. 

“It needs to be in regards to the music first, the tradition first, the fan-artist connection first,” Khalifa mentioned. “Most of those followers do not realize that they are interacting with a Web3 platform. A whole lot of followers could be turned off if we had been speaking about NFTs and wallets. And that is completely high-quality.”

Khalifa believes, nonetheless, that after Earl Sweatshirt followers expertise firsthand the advantages of a extra direct relationship with their musical idol and his artistic course of, they could be transformed.

“This know-how can create a fuller music expertise,” he mentioned. “These are issues I do not assume some other Web3 firms are doing, but in addition that no different tech firm or music firm is doing.”

It is smart why Gala would need to associate with an artist like Earl Sweatshirt, given the authenticity of his ethos and the zeal of his fanbase. However why did Earl associate with Gala?

Certainly, had the rapper dropped “Voir Dire” on any conventional platform, even with zero warning, Earl-World would have misplaced its thoughts. So why the scavenger hunt, why the blockchain factor, and why all of this throughout an unusually hectic tour for an unrelated album?

Does Earl care about decentralization? Does he need a extra direct relationship together with his followers? Or… this isn’t all an elaborate bit, is it? 

For a number of days, this reporter tried to contact Earl Sweatshirt via quite a few intermediaries, in pursuit of solutions to any of these questions. Solely simply earlier than publication, as Earl flew from New York to London for the ultimate cease of the “Doris” anniversary tour, did the rapper talk a single-sentence rationalization. 

“They didn’t discover the album on YouTube,” he mentioned.

After tonight’s London efficiency of “Doris,” at KOKO in Camden City, Earl is ready to move to the close by Jazz Cafe—positioned on the GPS coordinates teased in a clue earlier this week—to debut “Voir Dire” dwell with The Alchemist. The general public is invited to attend; some should must go and see it to consider it.