MIKE and Earl Sweatshirt resent the weight of expectation. After each of their prior records, fans were quick to project their own assumptions onto the pair, but both rappers have been equally fast to shatter them. Earl was, of course, the Odd Future wunderkind who dismissed Odd Future before his first solo album even dropped. Then, just as he seemed set to make waves as an ally to billy woods, ELUCID, Boldy James, and their ilk, he began hopping on tracks with loose young upstarts like Niontay and El Cousteau. Think MIKE wouldn’t gel with a Brooklyn experimentalist? Here’s Pinball. Think Earl wouldn’t fuck with Clams Casino? Here’s “Making The Band.” At this point, the only thing to expect from one of the most fruitful creative ecosystems in rap is the unexpected.
It’s no surprise, then, that the long-awaited collaboration between MIKE and Earl doesn’t sound quite like what the rap internet hoped it would. There’s no “H•A•M” here. POMPEII // UTILITY isn’t even a full collaborative album, really, but a split record—each artist is given one side each. Most of the names who lent production magic to beloved projects like Disco! or Live Laugh Love don’t appear here either; it’s instead helmed almost solely by SURF GANG, the Time Square cloud-rap collective who tend to work more with SoundCloud-eccentrics than artists who write effervescent tweets about KA.
Inspired by the prolificness of their collaborators, MIKE and Earl lowered the stakes of this much-anticipated project before it dropped. “It definitely came from having fun,” they said, framing it as a menagerie of songs assembled from a tidal wave of beats SURF GANG sent their way between 2023 and 2025. “Honestly,” declared Earl, “there wasn’t much overthinking.” Fair enough, expectations revised. But does that make for good music? On the mic, we know how MIKE and Earl are going to move. They drawl their flows like waking thoughts, less revving up and more stumbling out. Historically, though, their songs have been studies in contrast: hypnotic rhymes matched with off-kilter beats; lackadaisical deliveries finding pockets among gorgeous, twinkling pianos, Turkish-jazz chops, and mind-melting electro-funk. Often, the results are beautiful. But POMPEII // UTILITY takes a different—and less successful—approach.
To credit an album to SURF GANG is like attributing a verse to the Bible: nobody quite knows who does what (and credits weren’t provided for review). We do know, however, that the project was conceived and headed by one member in particular—Harrison. Among the various styles of the SURF GANG roster, Harrison’s is by far the most minimalistic in approach. His beats are willfully simplistic, moving at the glacial pace of an RPG load-screen. Warbling low-end here, prickly hi-hats there. His work feels forcefully synthetic and, on POMPEII // UTILITY, fundamentally depressive too. And that’s a problem. Setting the flows of MIKE and Earl over glacial beats ends up with a lot of the same color. It’s like fog floating over mist, a daze atop a daydream.
The issue is more pronounced on MIKE’s side. Take a song like “Da Bid,” which features both a guest spot from Jadasea and a beat switch, but all three artists are in the same mode. It’s become a meme online, but MIKE’s flow sounds truly disaffected here, all the energy wrought from a simple undulating beat which hardly gets the pulse racing in itself. The same effect manifests even on “AOK,” one of UTILITY’s most developed songs—it feels as if Earl can hardly keep up with the fairly tepid beat, ending his verse flow mid-sentence and letting the song slowly fade for the rest of its runtime, the musical equivalent of one giant shrug.
MIKE and Earl anticipated backlash to the SURF GANG connection: “the ‘real hip-hop’ fans are about to be off,” Earl told The Face last month. “These n***as rapping on beeps and boops!” On the contrary, some beeps and bloops would have been nice. SURF GANG used to be synonymous with childlike eccentricity. Listen to 2021’s “CINDERELLA,” or the ringtone-esque sparkle Evilgiane laced Maryland MC Slimesito with in 2024. It would be a joy to hear MIKE and Earl dance around bright, byzantine beats like those—we heard how Earl does it in “Making The Band”—but that is not the sound here.
Instead, these beats are simple, utilitarian, and straight-faced. During the “Tampering,” “Shutter Island,” and “Back LA” section, the songs read more as vignettes, rarely breaking 90 seconds in length, with no sonic deviation between them. During the latter, even MIKE seems to agree on the beat’s anaemic quality, dipping out of his own verse and leaving Earl’s old friend Na-Kel Smith to pick up the pieces. When Smith begins flowing even more drably than MIKE, the song starts to feel like a cruel and unusual punishment. Unlike their best work, both POMPEII and UTILITY come and go without any sense of forward direction, making the 65-minute runtime frequently drag. Neither rapper sounds like they’re having fun, either; inclusiveness often manifests as hard, joyless combativeness. “Bro I think they plotting on our spot / But it’s not for weak / I think n***as copying our style / But it’s not for free,” MIKE says on “NOT 4TW.” The cumulative effect is totalizing, like trying to stay conscious with the flu.
Earl and MIKE are too gifted for there not to be highlights, of course. There’s the hilarious moment on “Kirkland” where Earl spits “I got a few different flows, if you don’t like this one try this,” only to lumber into the next bar without a switch. On “AFRO,” MIKE is energized by thumping drums and recollections of his late mother. “Tour de France” finds Earl rapping with more rigor than he has since “Really Doe” out of nowhere, and he gets off some platinum bars in the process: “Feel like the Tour de France / I’m hogging the road the way I’m steerin’.” In totality though, moments like those are scarce—and for a record with a whopping 33 songs in total, “a few highlights” simply doesn’t cut it. Next time I want to hear Earl and MIKE together, I’ll just run Live Laugh Love into Showbiz! instead. That’s what I spent most of last year doing anyway. [10k]
Liam Inscoe-Jones is a fiction and music writer from the UK. His work has appeared in The Quietus, CRACK, The Clash, Rolling Stone UK, Tribune, and The Line of Best Fit. His debut book Songs In The Key of MP3 was released in 2025 on White Rabbit Books.
