In an interview with Clash Magazine following the release of Doris, Earl Sweatshirt said: "I’m starting to sound like myself again*. Doris* is cool, but you can hear the doubt in my voice." The remark played into the narrative surrounding the album: that it was a document of re-acclimating to the world after a year lost to boarding school, of trying to figure out (amongst a sudden rush of newfound attention and worldly temptations) what kind of music the still-teenage rapper was really interested in making. Nonetheless, "doubt" seemed a curious way of describing the actual music on Doris. Earl exhibits a stunning level of technical and tonal control on that album; if Doris, in all its brazenness and complexity, was Earl feeling timid, what would the opposite sound like?

His latest album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, suggests an answer. From the first bars of the swaggering organ-driven opener "Huey", it feels like the realization of a voice that, in some sense, he's had an APB out on since his first record: one that is both fluid and all angles, vacillating between naked introspection and pushing us as far away as possible. He sounds deadly serious and self-effacing at the same time, and his rocky, withdrawn psychology is more visible, and easier to trace, than ever.

Increasingly Earl is doing more with less, to an extent that might surprise many fans. He streamlines his verses radically, sometimes rapping at half his average speed on Doris. I Don’t Like Shit will come as a letdown to those who valued his DOOM-esque free association or Eminem-esque title-fight motor-mouthing, but he's lethally effective, absorbing whole styles for a verse's time as they seem to fit him. He strikes cocky, familiar poses in inventive ways ("Niggas want to fade me, bitches feel some type of way for me/ 50s in my pocket falling out like fucking baby teeth," "Niggas, my team is magicians/ We think of the shit that we want then we get it"). "DNA" finds him insult-rapping in stop-and-start and triplet flows straight from Kevin Gates and Lil Herb. He never sounds like he's experimenting or even switching hats—just finding the mode of communication that best fits his thought or mood.

The album’s aesthetic is still based in the ambling beats, messy synth counterpoint and off-jazz chording to which Odd Future releases usually defer. But Earl, who produces every track except Left Brain's "Off Top", dims the light to near-darkness. Melodies are oblique or hardly there, with keyboard leads diced up and strewn across tracks in fragments; drumbeats are tuned down and fuzzed out halfway into oblivion. The lead single "Grief" is perhaps the most interesting piece of production on the record—set back in a haze of post-industrial smog, it wheezes along like a broken piece of rusty machinery. The sound resembles the murky and glitch-ridden "alternative trap" of Chicago rapper Lucki Eck$, a recent collaborator of (stylistically like-minded) R&B artist FKA twigs.

While other OF artists struggle to avoid self-parody or anonymity, Earl is carefully whittling away at the proclivities he's always had, remaining confident that he’ll light upon something that feels fresh and honest. So far, he's right. He’s making music that never gets ahead of itself, or what he needs to communicate: the way he processes the outside world (on an example-by-example basis) and why and how he runs away from the things he runs away from. EARL’s precocious kid who said things you couldn’t believe he was saying, or Doris’ prodigal teen who had insights beyond his years, both feel distant. With nothing to prove and no longer an upstart, Earl sounds, more than ever, simply like himself.