Thebe Kgositsile is silent. He’s searching for the right words to summarise the last decade, one where he spent the majority of it in the spotlight as Earl Sweatshirt, the rapper who attained infamy through ‘Earl’, a 10-track debut mixtape in 2010 which featured harrowing lyrics full of malicious misogyny. Since then, he’s been followed by a rabid fanbase, a weight of expectation placed upon him by those who saw within his use of metaphors, double entendres and rhyme schemes, a generational talent. “It’s fucking weird,” he finally says. “When I look at the components of the way I had shit laid out for me, how if I was rooted in myself more and a little bit more confident, what could have been, who even I could have been. But, I’ve had to reconcile.”