Many of the tracks on Some Rap Songs were recorded in his home studio here in L.A., an isolated, gear-crammed little room. The bareness of the space reflects the record’s no-frills directive. The walls are completely naked except for a pinned headshot of Ol’ Dirty Bastard. He recorded most of the vocals for the album alone in this quiet sanctum. “I’ve become so attached to this idea of finding and sustaining self being more ultimately important than if you could dance to the shit,” he says.

The sounds on Some Rap Songs are textural and tightly coiled, meant as a longplaying piece. The album has an intimate relationship with the jazz of America and South Africa, re-interpreting the genre’s alien sense of time with out-of-step, dusty drum loops, through which Thebe presents extra-spatial raps. It ebbs and flows in a way that feels emblematic of journeying across an undulating landscape. (Escobar says he was pushing hard to present the entire record as one long standalone track, but the powers that be wouldn’t allow it.)

Thebe’s work is reflective of a commitment to albums amid a changing music industry. He laments the terrors of streaming: “These algorithms are weird and undefeatable.” He compares such innovations to other Silicon Valley blunders claiming efficiency always equals progress. “I miss the old evil,” he says, chuckling, referring to traditional music industry machinery. “Deification is the only other alternative to being a number now: You’re either a number or a god,” he adds, considering being an artist under the grey cloud of Big Data. “And if you’re a god, they love you like a god and they hate you like a god. Neither is real.” He seems to relish operating outside of the established system, which now means willfully subverting the online music economy that made his name.

Many of the music business practices of today were fomented by Odd Future, and few know the power of the internet like Thebe does. But he’s wary of those who might wield that power to certain ends—mostly kids who are the age he was when Odd Future broke, or younger. Facing away from a TV that’s connected to a Playstation 4 and a GameCube, he talks about being especially mindful of the gamers (“Them motherfuckas is about to be a political party”) and more recently recalls watching his young fanbase hijack his album’s rollout on Reddit when it leaked while he was vacationing in Palm Springs.

He’s cognizant of where his older music—songs about raping and dismembering women—fits into the spectrum, too. “There’s an incel community that fucked with OF super tough, just the idea of just boys being misogynistic with their bros,” he says. He wants that association erased. His breakout mixtape, Earl, was a product of teen angst and internalized rage frothing to the surface, and while he doesn’t wholly regret making it—after all, he wouldn't be where he is without it—he’s now hoping to bury it with music truer to who he really is.

“I hope the internet is not God for kids,” Thebe says, worriedly, ashing his spliff into a ceramic green ashtray with three frog heads poking straight up out of the rim. But after a moment of introspection, he reconsiders. “I don’t want to be sitting up piping all this negativity, bro. Because my heart is telling me, when I start to wander down them sentences, that niggas is figuring it out, and I can’t shit on they efforts.”

He acknowledges that Some Rap Songs may seem out of left field to some of his fans—or to Columbia, the major label that released it. “Figuring out how you can be radical from within the system breaks your head,” he says. “That’s where I’m really at: that frustrating-ass place. And this is the best attempt I got. Only so much can happen above ground.” He says Some Rap Songs is the last Earl Sweatshirt album on Columbia. “I’m excited to be free because then I can do riskier shit,” he adds.

Hearing Some Rap Songs makes you wonder what “riskier” might even sound like. It packs a dizzying amount of information into tight windows, and brevity is a core tenet of the 24-minute record. “I don’t want to waste people’s time,” Thebe explains. “Niggas got shit to do out here, period. I’m trying to say a lot of shit. It’s really dense. It can be overwhelming and have an air of exclusivity to it, a pompousness that I feel is only balanced out by me being like, I know what I’m doing to you. So I’ma sprint for you. I’ma act like your time is valuable.” As a result, his verses all seem to maximize moments, with their breadth exceeding the given room.

“Thebe takes these situations he’s talking about and enters from a fifth or sixth dimension,” says Escobar. “He’s looking at it from a completely different corner of the room that we can’t even conceive, but people don’t give a fuck about that. So much of it is marred in expectation and the spectacle—him being who he is and everything that’s happened. I wish people would fuck with how sci-fi this shit actually is.”

By giving more of himself, Thebe hopes to close the space between those otherworldly skills and his humanity. “I’ve really been trying to infuse myself into my work,” he says, “and a part of that self is the importance of family.”