Earl Sweatshirt’s description of himself: “A tad different—mad smart, act ignorant.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic

Earl Sweatshirt, a nineteen-year-old m.c., is one of the most notable members of the Odd Future hip-hop collective, a loose alliance based in Los Angeles, who began releasing music for free on their Tumblr, in 2009, when they were all teen-agers. Earl, born Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, was recognized early on as the most gifted m.c. of the group, and his major-label début, “Doris,” comes out this week. He is an exceptionally good rapper, talented enough to overcome the threatening, offensive mojo that Odd Future has spent years conjuring. The group’s style is manic, confrontational, profane, and irrefutably smart; sometimes, it seems as if the group were dedicated to reinforcing the historical idea of the teen-ager as a danger to society.

In 2011, the collective’s de-facto leader, Tyler, the Creator, was signed to the prestigious British independent label XL (home to Adele, his opposite in every way), which legitimatized the group in the eyes of some. But Tyler’s solo albums haven’t been huge commercial successes; his second record, “Wolf,” got good reviews when it was released, in April, but it quickly drifted out of the conversation.

Odd Future initially made its name by being stubbornly perverse, endorsing bad behavior in songs and on the Internet. Their imagery was generally goofy—like the yearbook photograph of a white girl on the cover of Earl’s début mixtape, “Earl”—but their albums were full of shock rhymes that blended casual misogyny, homophobia, and honest, often self-loathing introspection. Rape was a constant trope, and it comes up repeatedly on “Earl.” A duet with the rapper Vince Staples, “epaR,” is devoted to the subject: “Three seconds it takes for her to turn blue with my hands around her throat. Her arms stopped moving, pulse stops too, in the back, look confused.” Plenty of other rhymes on the album will give you pause, depending on where you place yourself in relationship to narrators. “Earl” is a concise, foul explosion of lexical skill. On “Blade,” from Odd Future’s mixtape “Radical,” Earl recites a brief line that feels like instructions on how to read him and his intentions: “A tad different—mad smart, act ignorant.” Though most of “Earl” is couched in cartoonish violence and antipathy, it marks the beginning of Earl’s therapy rap.

Odd Future manages to make music that speaks to the way angry teen-agers think, swerving between revenge fantasies and pained, explicit confessions—a blend of imagined power and reluctantly acknowledged powerlessness. The rape scenarios are revolting, but there are too many tipoffs—production values and the sophistication of the wordplay among them—to take them as more than a chance to épater Mom and Dad. (One line on “Wakeupfaggot” is “How ’bout you shut the fuck up, Mom?”) It seemed likely that Odd Future would worm themselves into every teen-ager’s home, and then turn into something else, just as teen-agers morph into adults. And so they did. Today, the members of Odd Future seem less like antisocial hooligans and more like people who have made careers out of being surly teen-agers. Lately, they have even opened pop-up stores to sell skateboards and T-shirts.

In 2010, after releasing his mixtape, Earl disappeared from view. He went to Samoa for a stint at a boarding school for at-risk boys. Fans wore “Free Earl” T-shirts, although it turned out that he hadn’t been deprived of any freedom; he consented to his Samoan break. Now Earl is back in L.A., where he recorded his new album.

“Doris” has some sex—all of it consensual—little violence, and, the more you listen, less and less to do with “Earl.” Tyler is a minor presence here; Earl produces many of the tracks under the name randomblackdude, working with a few of the Odd Future members, and he uses a track each from A-list hip-hop producers the Neptunes and RZA. It turns out that he didn’t need any of the shock tactics at all.

“Doris” has the density and the force of the classic Ghostface Killah album “Ironman,” in which the narratives and the language are equally important and equally restrained. Earl doesn’t use funny voices, and he doesn’t radically vary tracks once they begin. (There is also a distinct absence of flamboyance.) He is a methodical rapper who recalls word-heavy m.c.s. from the nineties, like Nas and Saafir.

“Burgundy,” produced by the Neptunes, is an easygoing combination of snares and horns that ambles and limps forward. Staples, Earl’s frequent foil on the album (much as Ghostface used his fellow Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon), opens by asking him why he seems “all sad and shit.” Earl goes on to talk about his grandmother Doris, who died while he was making the album, and the hype surrounding the collective: “So don’t tell me that I made it, only relatively famous in the midst of a tornado.” Later, on “Sunday,” Earl frames his life differently, while seemingly talking to a girl. “I’m fucking famous if you forgot, I’m faithful despite all what’s in my face and my pocket. And this is painfully honest, and when I say it I vomit.” The track, produced by Frank Ocean and Earl, combines organ with shuffling brushed drums; it doesn’t enlarge past a soft backbeat and a unison organ-and-guitar figure. Nothing on “Doris” ever really speeds up or becomes particularly energetic.

The ferocity is all in the words, delivered in Earl’s even, burred voice, which rarely cracks a monotone. He lets Staples do more of the character manipulation. On “Hive,” Staples raps that “if this was ’88, I woulda signed to Ruthless,” a record label that was home to Compton groups like N.W.A.—an explicit link to gangsta rap that Odd Future doesn’t usually make.

The mainstream rapper whom Earl and his associates are most linked to is Kanye West. One of West’s innovations was to invert hip-hop’s rules about bragging and boasting; ugly stories and raw admissions have become as triumphant as claims to greatness once were. Earl has little of West’s sonic vision, but he may be even better at using words to frame his belief system: if hip-hop can’t pull off cultural revolution or liberation, it can at least become the most plainspoken genre. Owing to this warts-and-all populism, hip-hop now has antiheroes selling like heroes. Earl, like West, represents not an ideal of omnipotence but the promise never to censor a thought.

In July, Earl performed a show at a garage on Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side. The room was fetid and smelled of oil. Several customized cars had been jacked up on hydraulic lifts. The event was being filmed for a Vitamin Water concert series, and cameramen hovered around the stage. Earl wore his default outfit of a T-shirt, a baseball cap, and cutoff pants. His legs are rebar-thin. His eyes are heavy-lidded, and he rarely betrays an emotion beyond the look of someone doing something he’d rather not be doing. His d.j., Syd, is the sole woman in Odd Future. She has a sharp, elegant face and a short haircut, and is the only member who smiles easily and often.

Most Odd Future performances are like hardcore shows, with lots of stage diving and physical mayhem. This was not that. There were only fifty people in the audience, and the mood was as flat as the air. Earl clearly prefers the chaos to the commerce. “Man, it’s like a bookstore in here,” he said after two songs.

Staples lurked on the edge of the stage, but Earl kept coaxing him out toward the center. For his thirty-two-bar verse on “Hive,” from “Doris,” Earl gestured to Syd to cut the beat. Staples performed his verse a cappella, sounding mechanical and forceful, the energy steady and contained. Being assigned to liven up a car-repair shop for a film crew is a fairly good test for an artist, a team-player obligation that involves patience. For all their reticence, Earl and his friends nailed every song. He’s not going to look like a grownup for a long time, but Earl Sweatshirt definitely has a job now. And he’s showing up for it. ♦