Rapper Earl Sweatshirt lets his angst hang out

Earl Sweatshirt is in a foul mood. He's lethargic and maybe even agoraphobic. To paraphrase the title of his cuss-dotted new album, he doesn't like (anything) and he doesn't go outside.

If he's to be believed throughout the 30-minute work, the rapper and producer born Thebe Neruda Kgositsile has mostly been dealing with a break-up, fighting with Xanax, smoking marijuana and lying real, real low. His only connection to the outside world, it seems, is his front door's peephole and maybe the pizza deliverer.

Even by Sweatshirt standards, this is grim stuff - no small feat considering that on the title of his very first track he described himself as ugly, that in his 2013 debut studio album, Doris (after a couple of breakout mix tapes and releases with the Odd Future collective), he cast a side-eyed glare at his increasing renown and worked hard to diminish expectations. On the new record, I Don't Like …, I Don't Go Outside, he's not hiding his grumpiness: "I've been like this since the Motorola Razr." Considering he's just 21 years old, that is more than half his life.

This is a different brand of darkness, though. Filled with barbs at former friends and verse-long defences of his culpability in a recent break-up, Earl's portrait of the artist as a young man reads as a kind of poetically executed tirade at both the world and himself, one tempered by his acknowledged good fortune.

"Good grief, I've been reaping what I sow," he raps on Grief, the first single. "I ain't been outside in a minute/ I been living what I wrote." All he sees out there are snakes - "Mama taught me how to read 'em when I look" - so he's staying in. He characterises his grandmother's death as when she "drank the mud".

This relentless insight, consistently sharp skills as a writer, and casually crucial delivery are key reasons Earl has been so doted upon by both the hip-hop cognoscenti and fans of the written word. Yes, his back story is fascinating, but even without it his fans would be clamouring for new work.