Since MIKE first shared a stage with Earl Sweatshirt on the latter’s ‘Fire It Up’ tour back in 2019, there’s been a sense of inevitability about a full-length collaboration. Both artists have long occupied the same introspective corner of underground rap, crafting inward-looking, emotionally dense work that resists easy interpretation.
On ‘Pompeii // Utility’, that long-anticipated convergence finally arrives, expanded into a sprawling 33-track opus, with Surf Gang’s boundary-pushing production tying it all together. The result is a project that bridges the hazy soul of the sLUms movement with the colder, industrial edges of contemporary New York rap.
Split into two halves, the album functions as both contrast and continuum. The first half, MIKE’s ‘Pompeii’, is rooted in collapse – named after the ancient city frozen in time, it unfolds like a slow-motion burial. Soul samples flicker beneath the surface but feel submerged, dragged through grit as loops decay mid-thought. The woozy ‘Minty’ serves as the clearest entry point, its hazy drift anchoring MIKE’s fluid, diaristic delivery (“On some geek shit, my momma know my time, I was campin’ while they sleepin’”). Yet he’s not confined to introspection: ‘Back Home’ injects a jolt of energy, with MIKE stepping into a more forceful, declarative mode, proclaiming “from BK to the Heights, I’m their last hope” over a menacing, head-nodding beat.
By contrast, Earl’s ‘Utility’ feels colder and more deliberate. Where his earlier work often leaned into abstraction, here he sounds locked in, guided by Surf Gang’s crisp, syncopated rhythms. ‘Earth’ sets the tone – skeletal, tense, and lyrically dense (“I don’t wanna be face of the league / Feel like Ant [Anthony Edwards, current NBA All-Star], it’s bigger than me”). On ‘Locusts’, he matches the frenetic energy of Lerado Khalil with a punchy, kinetic flow akin to ‘Doris’ or his 2023 banger ‘Making the Band (Danity Kane)’. Even so, Earl hasn’t abandoned his cryptic tendencies; on ‘Sisyphus’, he folds mythological imagery into everyday exhaustion, likening himself to the doomed figure “pushing all this weight uphill” after a “long day, for real”.
Surf Gang’s production acts as the connective tissue throughout. Rather than smoothing over differences, they sharpen them, warping MIKE’s warmth into something uncanny while pushing Earl’s minimalism toward mechanical abstraction. The beats feel unstable but intentional, giving both artists space to operate while maintaining a cohesive, if constantly shifting, sonic identity.
Clocking in at just over an hour, ‘Pompeii // Utility’ is undeniably a long listen, and it occasionally buckles under the weight of its own ambition. But within that excess lies its purpose: a restless, evolving portrait of MIKE and Earl Sweatshirt at a point where convergence feels less like a destination and more like an ongoing process.
