MAVI: “Landgrab” [ft. Earl Sweatshirt] Track Review

A little while back, I stumbled across a highlight tape of LeBron James and Dwyane Wade from their days hooping in Miami together. They were out there tossing no-look passes and full-court lobs to each other like adults with fake birth certificates at an AAU circuit. Men against boys, as they say. Will we ever see a duo like this again? I don’t know. But at least we have MAVI and Earl Sweatshirt, a pair of young, dexterous craftsmen fluidly working off of each other. “Landgrab,” MAVI’s first-ever single featuring another rapper, feels like it was cut short to make a point: He and Earl could probably flip strife into allegory, stretch triumph into hyperbole, and complete each other’s metaphors for eight minutes straight. Instead, we get a minute-and-a-half-long appetizer. And that’s all right for now.

MAVI had already established himself as Earl’s golden-haired scion by the time Earl released their first collab, “EL TORO COMBO MEAL,” in 2019. Listening to “Landgrab” feels more like a longstanding friendship as opposed to some sort of master/apprentice dynamic, though. Produced by Hollywood Cole, the saturated strings and bass glint with the red-orange hues that flood your windows at dusk. “I run faster than the machine/When I finally die, I’ma need more than one casket,” MAVI goads as Earl purrs behind him. Each one of them go for a few bars at a time, playing on this metaphor of speeding in a getaway car until MAVI throws Earl a lob he can’t miss:

“I was in the backseat hopin’ to cash in/Heard the whip crack—”
“And it woke up the master/We still everywhere, broken glass/When you get where you going just don’t look back.”

It feels like they recorded this standing side-by-side in the booth like Kasher Quon and Teejayx6 used to. Real poetry in motion. Yesterday, MAVI retweeted a post from a fan pleading for a collab album between him and Earl. I’m not gonna make any assumptions, but if “Landgrab” is the start of something as big as that, I’m gonna need courtside seats.