Locusts

What does it mean to swarm? The locust, that ancient image of collective appetite, arrives in Earl Sweatshirt's catalog at a curious moment: not when he was the starving teenager raiding every phoneme for shock value, and not during the fog-years when his music turned so inward it practically disappeared into itself. "Locusts" arrives in 2026, when Earl is 32, married, the father of two, and inhabiting a version of himself that his earlier audience could not have predicted. And yet here he is, matching syllables with a younger newcomer on a beat that sounds like machinery seizing in a half-empty warehouse, finding something urgent and almost hungry in himself that the word "utility" barely captures.

The Architecture of the Double Album

POMPEII // UTILITY, released April 3, 2026, represents the most ambitious structural exercise of Earl Sweatshirt's career, realized not as a solo record but as one half of a collaborative double album shared with New York rapper MIKE, with production handled almost entirely by the Surf Gang collective.^[1] The two sides operate as companion pieces: MIKE's POMPEII meditates on fear and the labor of redemption, while Earl's UTILITY explores faith and personal growth. Recorded across sessions in New York and Los Angeles between 2023 and 2025, the album formalizes a decade of mutual influence between two artists whose aesthetics had grown increasingly intertwined.^[2]

Earl chose the title UTILITY through word association with the Surf Gang beats themselves, their metallic, utilitarian textures suggesting a kind of purposeful functionality, an idea about being useful, adaptable, fluent across social registers.^[3] The concept also carried personal weight: by the time recording concluded, Earl had married actress and comedian Aida Osman, welcomed a second child, and put significant personal stability behind him after years of documented depression and withdrawal. The UTILITY side of the record is, among other things, an artist demonstrating what he can do with steadier ground beneath his feet.

"Locusts" sits within this framework as one of UTILITY's more kinetically charged offerings. It features Lerado Khalil, a rapper from Texas who relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota, and who has built his own reputation on music marked by themes of dissonance and emotional vulnerability.^[4] The pairing is generationally loaded: Earl, the veteran with a decade and a half of critical scrutiny behind him, alongside Khalil as a younger artist still carving his name into the landscape.

The Frenetic Engine

The production, handled by Harrison of Surf Gang, runs against the grain of most of Earl's recent work. His 2022 record SICK!, his 2019 EP Feet of Clay, and his 2018 masterwork Some Rap Songs all operated in a deliberately murky, slowed-down sonic space where beats pooled rather than moved. "Locusts" accelerates.

The beat has the quality of something mechanical, insistent, unable to stop, which is precisely what a locust is. A single locust is unremarkable; it is the swarm that defines the creature, the collective momentum that strips a field clean in hours. Earl finds a flow that NME described as reminiscent of his Doris-era work, punchy and kinetic, moving with an urgency that recalls the version of him who seemed to rap from a state of barely-controlled velocity.^[5]

The Intergenerational Pass

One of the track's most structurally interesting choices is the pairing itself. Earl opens by positioning himself with self-awareness, acknowledging his own place in the generational order relative to what he's doing on the track. There is something deliberate in the posture of a veteran rapper stepping onto a cloud rap beat and recognizing what that gesture requires of him. Khalil answers from a different vantage, bringing the energy of someone still in the early, consuming phase of an artistic life.

The locusts of the title may refer partly to this: the swarm of younger artists who eat through new sonic territory without the accumulated hesitation of a longer career. Earl doesn't step back from that energy. He runs alongside it.

Consumption, Transformation, Renewal

In Biblical tradition, the locust is both plague and harbinger. It signals devastation but also the end of an era, the stripping of one cycle to make way for the next. In the context of UTILITY, an album philosophically oriented toward faith and personal growth, the locust imagery takes on an ambivalent character. The title doesn't announce destruction so much as it announces a specific quality of appetite, one that is not delicate or selective but total.

A revealing detail surfaces in critical coverage of the track: both collaborators address changes in their relationship to substances, describing a shift in lifestyle habits that places "Locusts" inside a specific wellness discourse.^[6] This is a person who has made visible changes in his life and is processing what those changes feel like from the inside. Locusts, in that frame, might be understood as the old appetites, the forces that consumed time and clarity before this steadier era. Or they might be the energy that replaces those things: relentless, swarm-like, but directional.

Surf Gang's Metallic Canvas

The production context matters enormously. NPR described the Surf Gang sound as bridging the hazy soul of the sLUms movement with the colder, industrial edges of contemporary New York rap.^[7] The textures are faster-paced, minimal, mechanical, rewarding precisely the kind of punchy, staccato delivery that "Locusts" showcases. The aesthetic is almost entomological: precise, exoskeletal, clicking rather than breathing. Against this production, the locust metaphor stops being decorative. It becomes architectural. The beat itself sounds like a swarm.

Track reviewers recognized this quality. Ratings Game Music awarded "Locusts" a 4.5 out of 5, positioning it among the stronger entries on the album.^[8]

Cultural Significance

Earl Sweatshirt arrived in popular consciousness as a teenager, and the story of his development has been unusually public. The absence in Samoa, the careful uncurling of artistic ambition across six years of increasingly experimental music, the death of his father, South African political poet Keorapetse Kgositsile, in 2018, the extended period of deliberate hermitism: all of it has been traced, discussed, and interpreted by an audience that paid unusually close attention. That background gives a song like "Locusts" a strange gravity. When Earl addresses his age, his lifestyle changes, and the experience of keeping pace with a younger collaborator, it arrives not as abstraction but with biographical weight.

The collaboration with Lerado Khalil is also part of a longer pattern. Earl has consistently sought out and elevated younger artists whose aesthetic sensibilities interest him, using features and co-signs as an extension of his taste-making authority. The choice of Khalil, working in a tradition of dissonant, emotionally raw rap, reflects Earl's ongoing interest in music that doesn't perform wellness or happiness but sits honestly in whatever the present moment contains.

UTILITY's critical reception ranged from enthusiastic, with NME awarding the album four out of five stars, to more skeptical, with some reviews noting that the Surf Gang production's atmospheric consistency made the album feel static.^[5] "Locusts," with its relative kinetic charge, stands somewhat apart from that critique. It is one of the moments where the Surf Gang canvas produces heat rather than haze.

Alternative Interpretations

The locust title is rich enough to sustain multiple readings, and Earl, who has never been given to literal or self-explanatory lyricism, probably intended it that way.

One reading locates the locusts in the external world: the forces that descend on cultural figures, the critics and algorithms and attention economies that consume an artist's output and move on. In that frame, "Locusts" becomes a self-aware commentary on the conditions of contemporary rap, where artists are consumed by discourse at roughly the same speed they produce work.

Another reading inverts the metaphor: the rappers themselves are the locusts, arriving on a track and consuming its sonic real estate with total efficiency. The two-minute-ten-second runtime supports this. The song doesn't overstay, doesn't gesture toward a hook or a bridge designed for algorithmic approval. It arrives, it eats, it leaves. That's locust behavior.

A third reading, most consistent with UTILITY's personal-growth framework, understands the locust as a figure for the period Earl is leaving behind: the consuming years, the withdrawn years, the years when depression and old habits functioned as a kind of inward swarm, stripping away motivation and legibility. What remains after the locusts pass, in this reading, is not nothing. It is the stripped-down truth of the person underneath.

Conclusion

Earl Sweatshirt has always been a rapper whose biography shadows his music so closely that separating them requires deliberate effort. "Locusts" rewards that effort. It is a two-minute-ten-second statement of intent from someone who has learned, through considerable personal upheaval, that he still wants to be in this room: still wants to match energy with younger artists, still wants to find the language for where he is now rather than where he was.

The locust swarms and the locust moves on. Whatever it strips away, the land remains. Something grows.