Earl Sweatshirt Blasts Label for Botched I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside Launch

Photo by Sagan Lockhart

Earl Sweatshirt‘s new album, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, was only announced a week ahead of its March 23 release. The album, along with the “Grief” single, was announced on Monday night, March 16, while the video for “Grief” was released on Tuesday morning. Now, in an interview with NPR Music, Earl says his label, Columbia, messed up the entire launch.

Shortly after the album was announced, Earl tweeted several all-caps criticisms of his label, which we took as a goof on Top Dog Entertainment CEO Anthony Tiffith, who made similar complaints about the release of Kendrick Lamar’s new album. But speaking to NPR Music, Earl revealed that his frustration wasn’t a joke.

Originally, he wanted the video for “Grief” to go live on his website, without any attached album release information. Instead, everything but the video was released on Monday night: the cover, the tracklist, the features, and the release date.

He said he didn’t get the link to the “Grief” video until Monday morning, after he’d stayed up all night. “Brah, I was devastated,” he told NPR Music. “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?”

He also said it wasn’t only the error that rankled him, but the label’s nonchalant response. “They let it get spun like I was on a pedestal, complaining about some nuances, you know what I mean?” he said. “When it was really like zero percent of what was supposed to go right went right. Like, y’all got an F. It’s not chill. Like, ‘You’re in the red zone.’ And no one acted like they were in the red zone. That’s what had me the most hot.”

You can read the whole interview here.

Watch Earl on an episode of Pitchfork.tv’s “Over/Under”:

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