There have been two Odd Future sagas unfolding over the last year and a half. In full public view this Los Angeles hip-hop collective has become an unlikely mini-juggernaut of the post-record age, creating a significant touring and merchandise business with only the Internet behind it — not radio or video — and redefining narrow ideas about the hip-hop underground.  And then there’s been Earl Sweatshirt, the most promising rapper in the crew, who was nowhere to be seen, the gaping wound at the center of the body.  A few weeks ago Earl, who recently turned 18, returned to Los Angeles from Samoa, where he’d been enrolled at Coral Reef Academy, a program for at-risk youth. Since coming back he’s been making small steps toward re-emerging into public life.  He released a new song, “Home.” He used his Twitter account to reach out to Santigold about a collaboration. And to the joy of Odd Future fans eager to hear Earl reunited with the rest of the team, he appears on “Oldie,” a song from “The OF Tape Vol. 2” (Odd Future), a new compilation album that was released on Tuesday. On that song he raps, “Back like lateral passing/With that” — add a profane, enthusiastic adjective here — “gladiator manner of rapping .”  On Tuesday night Odd Future celebrated that album’s release with a show at the Hammerstein Ballroom, and piecing together that something was afoot wasn’t hard. Earlier Earl made a brief appearance in an interview on Hot 97 (WQHT-FM in New York) alongside the Odd Future leader, Tyler, the Creator — onetime best friends reunited. There was also the made-on-the-fly “Oldie” video, recorded at a Terry Richardson photo shoot. So at the Hammerstein, when two members of Odd Future, Hodgy Beats and Domo Genesis, performed “Tang Golf,” in which they promise to “free Earl from” the Samoans, it was not a total surprise that, a moment later, Earl Sweatshirt emerged, finally free.  It was his first live appearance with the rest of Odd Future, though you wouldn’t have been able to tell. He fit seamlessly into the scene, an easy part of the crew’s stage swarm, which seems disorganized but always manages to cohere. When he wasn’t rapping his verses, he was gleefully rapping along to everyone else’s — Domo Genesis’s “Doms,” Tyler, the Creator, and Frank Ocean’s “She” — as much fan as participant.  Earl Sweatshirt’s only album, “Earl,” was released two years ago, and remains one of the most invigorating displays of pure rapping in recent memory. After “Kill,” a song from “Earl” that is full of his signature complex rhymes — “The crowd go crazy, hands raised, I’m laced with/Swag by the eighth in case you wanna taste it” — Domo Genesis exhaled loudly and proclaimed, “I’m finding it hard not to pass out right now.”  Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, the Creator, performed “Orange Juice” side by side, and at times it seemed like the two were reminiscing about something, locked in their own private conversation while everyone else onstage kept performing. “You have no idea how awesome this is,” Tyler said near the end of the night  After “Radical,” the barnburner that often closes Odd Future shows, in dropped the slow, sludgy beat for “Earl,” the song whose video made Earl Sweatshirt a star during his absence. He was rapping, but not as loudly as the couple of thousand people in the crowd, who finally had a face to go with the song.
At a Hammerstein Ballroom show the hip-hop crew Odd Future celebrated the release of a new album and the return of Earl Sweatshirt.