Last year, around the time he released Some Rap Songs and ended his deal with Columbia Records, Thebe Kgositsile said he was looking forward to “doing riskier shit.” Apparently, that meant turning his already-insular music darker and more inscrutable. The rapper, better known as Earl Sweatshirt, doesn’t offer much direct commentary on Feet of Clay. Instead, he pushes further into the murky territory he began mapping on Some Rap Songs, loosening up his flow, letting down his guard, and wandering ever-further into the recesses of his mind.

Kgositsile has described Feet of Clay, his latest seven-track, 15-minute project, as “a collection of observations and feelings recorded during the death throes of a crumbling empire.” The title references the Bible’s Book of Daniel: in it, the prophet interprets a dream of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, in which he sees a colossal statue made of four metals: a head of gold, arms and chest of silver, body and thighs of brass, and feet of iron and clay. Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar the statue represents the kingdoms of the Earth, starting with Babylon, and that a stone cut by non-human hands will fall on the statue’s feet and destroy it, a metaphor for the end times. “We at the feet of clay right now,” Kgositsile told Apple Music. “We posted up live from burning Rome.”

His verses don’t give much clarity to that ambitious context so much as they offer fragments: “I beat you to the point/My noose is golden/True and livin,’ lonesome/Pugilistic moments/Riveting, come get to know me at my innermost/My family business anguish, now I need atonement,” he raps on “OD.” The line hints at Kgositsile’s grief over his father, who passed in 2018. This is the project he made in the wake of that loss. The pall of death haunts the edges of his rhymes; birds of prey circle carrion on “74,” and on “OD” he raps, “My memory really leaking blood/It’s congealing, stuck.” If these are confessions, they are delivered in code, and the meaning comes from the sounds of the words themselves.

As a teenage prodigy, Kgositsile leaned hard on his technical skill. Now an adult, he still cares deeply about craft, but he seems to be thinking differently about delivery and performance. There are moments on Feet of Clay when he seems to be actively subverting ideas of what being good at rapping sounds like. On “East,” which pairs blunted raps with a harsh accordion-like wail, he mutters “had a story careen against the bars,” and it’s the closest he’s come to defining the style he’s striving for: narrative and emotional, physical and abstract.

As with Some Rap Songs, this project is heavily influenced, in aesthetic and tone, by the New York City rap underground; not just recent Earl Sweatshirt collaborators like MIKE, Medhane, and Ade Hakim but also minimalist Ka, dialectician billy woods, and impressionist Akai Solo. Kgositsile has adapted rather quickly to this gloomy, withdrawn world of distorted jazz and R&B loops supporting his talky cadences. This is straight-up anti-pop-rap: unpolished, unevenly mixed, structurally unbalanced, primarily self-produced, and polarizing.

The warped, bassy “4N,” which accounts for nearly a third of the project’s running time, partners him with fellow recluse Mach-Hommy, the brusque and enterprising Jersey rapper Kgositsile has long admired. As the beat winds like a skipping record, they keep everyone at arm’s length. There is some more traditional production: the Mavi-assisted “El Toro Combo Meal” dusts off a vintage soul sample, and the Alchemist-produced “Mtomb” bends Mtume’s “Theme For the People” into a sputtering hymn. But even these are merely cushions for wrestling with deep-seated trauma. On the latter: “Piscean just like my father, still got bones to pick out/For now let’s salt the rims and pour a drink out.”

There is a punch-drunk quality to Kgositsile’s verses that occasionally makes them seem like stoned spitballing. But they have the looseness of freestyles, a nonlinear flow he may have picked up from Mavi, a pupil turned sparring partner. They don’t sound half-baked so much as purposefully unfinished, a move even further off the grid for one of our most promising shut-ins. Nearly a decade after becoming a prodigal rap savant, Earl Sweatshirt is still burning old selves in effigy, figuring out who he wants to be in real time.