Shows of the Week: Earl Sweatshirt Is Free to Be Himself

Thursday, Dec. 11

Antibalas has taken on the unenviable task of carrying on the legacy of a genre that was arguably perfected by its inventor, Fela Kuti. Yet the New York Afrobeat band not only builds on Fela’s blueprint through their influences from Cuban and Jamaican music—they’ve turned their take on the Nigerian bandleader’s sound into a cottage industry, serving as the house band for Bill T. Jones’s Fela! musical on Broadway while showing up on recordings by everyone from Mark Ronson (that’s them playing horns on “Uptown Funk”) to TV on the Radio. The Get Down, 680 SE 6th Ave. 8 pm. $35.44. 21+.

Friday, Dec. 12

Acid King makes comfort-food heavy metal, the kind your mom used to worry about. The San Francisco doom band aims for the same pleasure centers in the head typically tickled by cannabinoids, and you know one of their songs is working if it makes you feel troglodytically stupid. Their iconography draws strongly from the satanic panic of the ’80s, when metal was seen as a transgressive cultural current rather than the pursuit of bored kids with glazed eyes and fried amps—though they sound like that, too, not least on their latest album, Beyond Vision. Star Theater, 13 NW 6th Ave. 8 pm. $31.39. 21+.

Monday, Dec. 15

Earl Sweatshirt started his career as enfant terrible of L.A. rap collective Odd Future, a teenage transgressor whose lyrics allegedly offended his mom so much she sent him to a reform school in Samoa for much of the group’s rise. The group’s most purely skilled rapper even at age 16, he was clearly a rising star, but no one could have predicted his longevity or his growth; after a move to the East Coast, he immersed himself in NYC’s rap tradition and is now comfortable among dad jokes and blunt-scented samples on recent albums like this year’s Live Laugh Love. Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St. 6:30 pm. $51.75. All ages.