For Earl, hip-hop with integrity is rooted in honesty, and his second retail album I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside – which was released in March – is an unfiltered snapshot of his life during a difficult transitional stage. Clocking in at a slender 30 minutes, the beats on the album – almost entirely produced by Earl under his randomblackdude alias – are fuzzy, sepia- toned soundscapes with lo-fi, sluggish drums. With an absence of obvious hooks or crowd-pleasing bangers, you’re left with no choice but to listen closely to the words. “I prefer making music in situations where I’ve got to keep it down,” he explains. “In the apartment I live in, the room that I do music in is right above where little girls sleep, so I can’t be like, slamming that shit. That’s the true test of something that’s good to me. If you’re doing something that’s not very loud, but it’s fire as fuck.”

Earl has always let pain seep through his lyrics. Even when he was engaging in the adolescent pursuit of offending for fun, the anger directed towards his absent father (he once referred to himself and members of OF as the “product of popped rubbers”) always exposed his vulnerability. But with prominent themes of addiction, anxiety, the fake friends who circle around his fame and the loss of his grandma, I Don’t Like Shit… sees Earl treat the recording booth like a shrink’s couch more than ever. “If you spell out the root of the problem, you shed light onto anything that could be a mystery as to why you’re feeling the way you are,” he explains. “But if you shed light on it all and you still don’t do anything, that’s when weird shit starts happening to you, I swear.”