When Earl raps, he gazes far off into the distance, so cosmically bored is he by our interest. Watch him on “Sway in the Morning,” at god knows what hour, slumped in front of a fluorescent-lit table: This freestyle is an industry rite of passage, and yet this one is different, precisely because Earl is there, and everyone, in that moment, exists to please him. Sway plays beat after beat; Earl, with the contemptuous purity of a teenager, waves each one away. "What would you prefer?" Sway asks courteously, his industry-vet eyes narrowing with the effort of getting inside Earl's head. When he drops "Drop It Like It's Hot (Remix)", a grin cracks Earl's face; his head bops goofily. The physical relief that washes over Sway's body, as he leans back, is palpable.

This is the relationship Earl has to the world: We want, more than anything, to hear him rap. We will stand and wait expectantly for minutes, years. Frankly, it's awkward, maybe even a little pathetic. Being a functioning teenager, he doesn't exactly relish handing expectant adults what they're waiting for, and thus the first voice we hear on Doris belongs, hilariously, to Frank Ocean's cousin.

This ambivalence is the dance of Doris, the story of Earl Sweatshirt: How do you do what you want when strangers seem to want it even more badly than you do? "Don't nobody care about how you feel," Vince Staples teases on the intro to "Burgundy". "We want raps." Sooner or later, he's going to have to give up the goods. So he sighs, leans in, opens his mouth.

The second he does, our anticipation justifies itself. Quite simply, there hasn't been a more viscerally enjoyable and economical rapper working in years. Earl's POV leaps from the front seat of a car into the sky in a single line ("Ride dirty as the fucking sky that you praying to"); family communications break down into a series of sound effects ("Mama often was offering peace offerings/ Think, wheeze, cough, scoff, and then he's off again"); Earl sprouts a ballooning gut and morphs into a fattened hedonist (You know me, drugs out front the telly/ I'm couch-drunk, ready to fuck/ Count 'fetti and bucks/ Count loud as I slap loud cross the belly"). Try wrestling free of the line "hard as armed services/ y'all might'a heard of him" once he utters it.

But Earl's heart is in here, too—his father, his mother; that fabled camp for troubled teens, being outed by Complex; girls, fame, puppy love, being true to yourself. "Breaking news that's less important when the Lakers lose/ There's lead in that baby food," he deadpans on "Hive". He can tell you are a little dumb, maybe. But he'll oblige, eventually. He even assented to Sway at last, unleashing a verse so devastating that Sway nearly doubled over when it was finished. Earl's verdict? "That was butt." —Jayson Greene