Chicago

A song called "Chicago" near the end of Earl Sweatshirt's side of POMPEII // UTILITY lasts just under two minutes, but it carries the weight of a birthplace. Earl Sweatshirt (Thebe Neruda Kgositsile) was born in Chicago on February 24, 1994, before his family relocated to Los Angeles, where he would grow up, discover hip-hop, and eventually upend what teenagers were allowed to do with language on record.^[1] By the time he named a track after that city, more than three decades had passed. He had been to Samoa and back. He had buried his father. He had made five studio albums, married, and become a father twice. Chicago, the place, was something he knew mostly from the outside looking in.

That distance is the point.

The Album Around the Song

POMPEII // UTILITY arrived April 3, 2026, as a collaborative double album split between Earl and New York rapper MIKE, with nearly all production handled by the Surf Gang collective. MIKE commands the POMPEII side (fifteen tracks), and Earl holds down UTILITY (eighteen tracks). The structural logic is conceptual: POMPEII represents fear, and UTILITY represents faith.^[2]

"Chicago" lands at track fifteen on UTILITY. That positioning matters. By that point in the album's sequencing, Earl has already worked through tracks named after the bluesman Leadbelly, the mythological Sisyphus, and Jurassic 5 emcee Chali 2na.^[2] He has traced a map of cultural antecedents, figures who endured, labored, or modeled a particular relationship to persistence. Then, near the album's close, he names a city.

UTILITY's Organizing Logic

Earl has described the UTILITY concept as beginning with a specific sound: the metallic texture in Surf Gang's beats prompted a kind of word association that landed on utility as a concept. From there, the idea expanded to encompass the value of having social fluidity, especially in what Earl calls "this post-COVID antisocial moment, where young people are afraid of being cringe."^[3]

That observation, understated and almost self-deprecating, turns out to be central to understanding UTILITY as an artistic statement. Earl is not making grand philosophical claims. He is thinking about practical virtues: groundedness, presence, social legibility, the ability to connect. In an era of performative isolation, those turn out to be quietly radical qualities.

"Chicago" fits that framework precisely. A city named on record is an act of grounding. It says: I know where I come from. I am still thinking about it.

Production and Sound

The track is co-produced by Harrison, Surf Gang's primary architect on the album (responsible for twenty-five of thirty-three tracks), and Tony Seltzer, a Brooklyn-based producer whose work tends toward hard drums and assertive low-end architecture.^[2] The collaboration between those two sensibilities creates a spare container for Earl's voice: Harrison's minimal, intuitive textures alongside Seltzer's structural instincts.

Seltzer has described his collaborative approach as centered on simplification, leaving enough space for a rapper's voice to breathe while building enough structure to make the beat feel purposeful. He takes pride, as he has put it, in "being able to turn the beat into a song with somebody and really bring it together."^[4]

That philosophy aligns with what UTILITY does broadly. Harrison's production throughout the album favors minimal, not-overthought textures. Earl described learning from watching Harrison work: "Super intuitive. Minimal. Not overthinking."^[5] For a track that carries the weight of a birthplace, that restraint is doing serious compositional work. It refuses grandeur. It stays close to the ground.

The City as Cultural Cartography

Chicago is not a neutral choice of name. In the history of Black American music, the city operates as a kind of magnetic pole. Blues music, born in the Mississippi Delta, migrated north to Chicago in the mid-twentieth century and became something harder and electrified. House music was invented in Chicago in the early 1980s. Drill, the hard-edged trap variant that reshaped a generation's sonic landscape, emerged from the city's south and west sides in the early 2010s. The name carries that history even when it isn't explicitly invoked.

For an artist whose other UTILITY tracks name-check a Delta bluesman (Leadbelly) and the ancient myth of Sisyphus -- both figures defined by labor against resistance -- "Chicago" enters that same conceptual conversation.^[2] The city is another form of endurance, another site where something was built out of difficulty.

Earl's own family history adds another layer. His father, Keorapetse Kgositsile, was a South African poet who spent decades in exile before returning home as the country's National Poet Laureate. His mother, Cheryl Harris, is a critical race theorist at UCLA whose work engages questions of identity and legal history. Earl was born in Chicago during a period when both parents were immersed in the city's intellectual and political life.^[1] The city, for him, is where his life as a physical fact began, even if his memories of it are secondhand.

Faith and Origins

The POMPEII // UTILITY conceptual framework, fear on one side and faith on the other, is important context for what "Chicago" accomplishes emotionally. Fear, in MIKE's framework, is the anxiety of living in a world that can be destroyed at any moment. Utility, in Earl's, is faith: faith in yourself, in your social connections, in the practical value of showing up and being present.^[3]

Naming a song after your birthplace is, in this context, an act of faith. It says: I trust my origins enough to look at them directly. That is a quieter achievement than it sounds, particularly for an artist who spent much of his earlier career processing trauma through studied abstraction and deliberate obscurity.

The trajectory of Earl's career, from the raw early mixtapes through the grief-saturated compression of Some Rap Songs to the more open emotional register of Live Laugh Love and now POMPEII // UTILITY, is a story about a person gradually trusting themselves to be legible. "Chicago" is a small but precise expression of that trust.

The Short Track as Intentional Choice

At one minute and forty-eight seconds, "Chicago" is not trying to be an epic. It is a vignette, an impression, a station in a longer journey.^[2] That brevity is a formal choice that makes a philosophical argument: you do not need to exhaust a subject to honor it. You do not need to perform grief or nostalgia for them to be real. Sometimes naming something is enough.

This has been Earl's compositional tendency for a while. His records since I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside have favored compression over expansion, trusting the listener to hear what the space between the words is doing. UTILITY continues that tradition, and "Chicago" is perhaps its most concentrated example.

Critical and Cultural Resonance

Critics who engaged with POMPEII // UTILITY found Earl's UTILITY side to be a rewarding and, in places, surprising body of work. The NME described it as "colder and more deliberate" than his earlier recordings, noting that he "sounds locked in, guided by Surf Gang's crisp, syncopated rhythms."^[6] Bandcamp Daily praised the "elastic, dreamlike productions" and Earl's "free-associative mastery," his ability to move through a set of loosely connected references, including mythology, blues, and cycling, and make it cohere emotionally.^[7]

NPR's review noted that the record successfully challenged the "puritanical notion that 'real' rap must have a literary quality," arguing that Earl's introspective approach works effectively over Surf Gang's trippier, psychedelic textures.^[8] "Chicago" is a demonstration of that point: it is not literary in the conventional sense, but it resonates the way memory resonates, diffuse and specific at the same time.

Alternative Readings

It is worth acknowledging that not every song titled after a place is literally about that place. "Chicago" might be addressing a person, a feeling, a relationship, or a moment that the city's name has come to stand in for. Earl's lyrics are rarely straightforward, and his tendency toward compression means that a single proper noun can carry multiple registers simultaneously.

But even if the song is not primarily autobiographical, the choice of the word still matters. Chicago has weight. It carries the history of Black American reinvention, the Great Migration, the electric blues, house music, drill, the political movements that ran through the city's universities and neighborhoods, and all of that history is available to the listener who wants to bring it to the song.

That open-endedness is a feature, not a bug. An artist who has spent his career making music that rewards sustained attention and resists passive listening has every reason to title a song in a way that invites interpretation without foreclosing it.

Conclusion

What does "Chicago" mean? It means the place you were born before you knew how to be anywhere. It means the city that contains your origin story without you being present to remember it. It means, in the context of an album built around faith, the act of trusting your own history enough to say its name out loud.

Earl Sweatshirt has spent more than a decade making records that seem to resist easy meaning, and then revealing, in retrospect, that they were precisely as clear as they needed to be. "Chicago" is barely two minutes long, but it asks the same questions his entire body of work has been turning over: where do you come from, and what do you owe it?

His answer, here, is not a philosophical treatise. It is a song. It is a name. Sometimes that is all it needs to be.