POMPEII // UTILITY

POMPEII // UTILITY is a double album released April 3, 2026, a collaborative effort between Earl Sweatshirt and New York rapper MIKE, with production handled almost entirely by the Surf Gang collective (primarily Harrison and CajM). The project divides into two sides: MIKE handles the POMPEII half (15 tracks), while Earl commands the UTILITY half (18 tracks).^[1]

The album title emerged from a specific moment. MIKE recalled that the name POMPEII originated during summer 2024 sessions at the Warp studio in Los Angeles, where someone joked that the place looked like Pompeii because everyone was frozen and tired.^[2] The sessions stretched across New York and Los Angeles between 2023 and 2025, a period in which both artists were experiencing significant personal changes.

The album draws on the imagery of Pompeii's volcanic destruction as a conceptual framework. POMPEII represents fear and the work of redemption, while UTILITY represents faith and personal growth. The arc of the project conveys that one can come from destruction and still find renewal.^[1]

Earl chose the title UTILITY for its associations with social fluidity, usefulness, and resistance to easy categorization, describing it as emerging from word association with the metallic, minimalist sound of the Surf Gang beats. He explained thinking about the utility of being a cool person, the value of having social fluidity.^[2]

The collaboration formalizes a decade of mutual influence. MIKE cited Earl as a foundational creative presence in his teenage years; Earl later acknowledged the reverse influence when MIKE's compressed, murky aesthetic shaped the sound of Some Rap Songs (2018). By 2026, the exchange had grown too entangled to separate cleanly, making a joint project an almost inevitable acknowledgment.^[3]

The two sides mostly stay separate, but they touch directly in two spots: MIKE's "Kirkland," where Earl ad-libs through MIKE's verse rather than trading a full one of his own, and Earl's "Leadbelly," which brings MIKE over to the Utility side. Both are brief, low-key features rather than showcase duets, more evidence of the pair's comfort with each other than a bid for a standout collaborative moment.^[3]

Beneath the destruction-and-renewal framing sits a more personal narrative of grief and sobriety. On UTILITY highlights like ":( again :)", Earl addresses his decision to stop drinking directly, describing it as a line drawn against old patterns and an accounting of the harm those patterns caused people close to him. Reviewers noted the harsh, metallic drum programming across the side pushed Earl to trade his old cryptic wordplay for a more transparent, unguarded delivery.^[4]

The album received broadly positive critical reception, with The Guardian and NME each awarding it 4 out of 5 stars. Reviewers praised Earl and MIKE as two of hip-hop's defining modern lyricists while noting that the Surf Gang production favors atmospheric immersion over conventional rap dynamics.^[3]

Not every track on Utility sits in the wreckage. “Home on the Range,” a brief, synth-lit song built on Harrison's crisp, mechanical drums, is one of the record's clearest sonic departures from Surf Gang's usual murk, and it became bright enough a statement that its title was given to the joint 2026 tour Earl, MIKE, Harrison, and Niontay mounted behind the album, crossing North America and Europe.^[5]

On the POMPEII side, the destruction-and-renewal concept extends to the album's physical presentation: all of the accompanying artwork was designed by sculptor Sharif Farrag, reinforcing the building-and-collapse imagery in visual form.^[6] MIKE's half carries its own quieter, grief-inflected tracks, including the minute-long “Shutter Island,” a compressed, claustrophobic entry that critics singled out for filing accumulated emotional damage into just a few lines rather than building toward a conventional sad-song payoff.^[6] Reception has landed the album a 77 on Metacritic, a range that spans The Guardian's four-star notice to a more skeptical response from critic Anthony Fantano, though even skeptical reviews tend to grant that the project's sprawling, 33-track length is a deliberate refusal of curation rather than a lack of editing.^[6]

The rollout began with a double single: MIKE's “Minty” and Earl's “Earth,” released March 10, 2026 alongside a joint music video from directors Ian Lopez and Richard Phillip Smith.^[5] Surf Gang producer Harrison has said “Minty” itself dates back much further than the album's own sessions, originating from an unplanned, one-off session during the COVID era, years before it found a home on the eventual record.^[7]

Producer Harrison has said that a run of shorter POMPEII tracks, including "NOT 4TW," "THE POPE," "AFRO," "Minty," and "F.E.A.R." (featuring MIKE's labelmate Niontay), started out as atmospheric outros and bridges without an obvious home in the sequence, and only found their place once the album's overall pacing came together.^[7] "F.E.A.R." itself trades hookless, back-to-back verses between MIKE and Niontay, labelmates on MIKE's own 10K Global imprint who each lost a parent early in life.^[7][8].

"NOT 4TW," a brisk feature with Brooklyn vocalist Anysia Kym produced by Harrison and Earl Sweatshirt, leans into the flex side of MIKE's half, cataloging the accumulated evidence of a decade of independent work rather than any single breakout moment. Reviewers noted that MIKE, 27 at the time of the album's release and long established as the head of his own label, sounds comfortable and confident throughout POMPEII, joyful without tipping into excess, which colors even the record's boastful stretches with a settled, unhurried quality.^[9][10]

Track three on Pompeii, "Da Bid," brings in South London rapper Jadasea for one of only a handful of outside features on MIKE's half of the record. The pairing carries its own transatlantic logic: MIKE spent part of his own childhood in Hackney, East London, while Jadasea grew up across the city in Peckham, a neighborhood he has said had little rap scene of its own before his generation of MCs came up, one shaped in part by American hip-hop filtering back across the Atlantic.^[11]

Elsewhere on POMPEII, the album's destruction-and-renewal concept turns inward on "MY WORST (rebuke)," the brief, psychedelic second track on which MIKE admits the patterns that defined his lowest period could resurface rather than treating that period as safely closed¹². Critics highlighted the song's sustained, technical rhyme scheme and its hazy, warping vocal sample as some of the sharpest writing and production on either half of the record¹³.

One of the Pompeii side's smaller, more internal moments is “#FREE #MIKE,” track fourteen, written and produced with Harrison and RedLee^[14]. Its title borrows the shape of a viral free-the-prisoner hashtag campaign and repurposes it for a much more private kind of confinement, the sense of being watched and shaped by an audience rather than literally detained. MIKE has linked that feeling directly to his own tendencies as an artist, describing himself as “super controlling” with his music by default, a habit he traces to a broader, constant anxiety that makes him premeditate everything; he has said making this album specifically required him to practice letting go of that instinct^[15].