Earl Sweatshirt Details What Went Wrong With His New Album Roll-Out

Earl Sweatshirt dropped his new album, I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside on Monday (March 23) however he was extremely disappointed with how the album was released. With only a week of promo, the album came as a surprise after Earl's new single and video, "Grief" hit the web. At the end of the visual was the information for the sophomore LP. The OFWGKTA rhymer quickly hopped on Twitter to vent, claiming his label—Columbia Records—messed up the roll out of his latest project.

While speaking with NPR at SXSW, Earl went into further details regarding the apparent mistake, saying he and his home label "just had a disconnect with the roll out of everything." According to the Sweatshirt, he wanted to drop the video before any information regarding the album was released.

"Just with the launch. I wanted the video to go up first so that — cause it would've been out of complete nowhere. The video with the song would've been enough to digest. The title of the album's at the end of the video. That's — I presume that the consumer is smart enough to put two and two together. Like, that's not that crazy. So we don't need — my whole thing was we don't need to shove it down their throats. Cause the initial thing that they had for me, like the layout for the website —

This is where the complication happened: We were going to put the video on a website, like, the Earl Sweatshirt website. Real simple. Video on the thing. But when it came to me it had a bunch of banners on it, like "Download the new album." More than you see on dudes who are bigger than me, you know? So I was like, "Just take the banners off. We'll launch the thing." So we were sitting there waiting and I check my Twitter. And this kid that's, like, a fan that's a cool dude though, seen him on Twitter say something about the album. I was like — started researching, and my s—-, everything except the video, had come out. The album cover, the tracklist, the features."

This way, fans could focus on new Sweat rather than the hype of the album at the same time. He also details his label frustrations and how devastated he was how everything turned out.

"Brah, I was devastated. I was so mad cause it was like — especially because I feel like this is my first album. This is the first thing that I've said that I fully stand behind, like the good and the bad of it. I've never been behind myself this much. So for them to not treat as importantly as I was treating it was just like — I couldn't help but to feel a little disrespected, you know?"

Earl explains that he grew even more frustrated after the mistake, claiming Columbia tried to spin it back on him. Listen to the full interview below.

Filed Under: Columbia Records, Earl Sweatshirt, grief, i don't go outside, i don't like shit, npr

Categories: News