Odd Future's Earl Sweatshirt returns home, releases new song

Rapper Earl Sweatshirt, a member of eccentric Los Angeles hip-hop collective Odd Future, has apparently returned home from a lengthy stay at a Samoan youth camp.

Long a source of Internet speculation, the question of Sweatshirt's whereabouts took on a new twist after the rapper -- whose real name is Thebe Kgositsile -- appeared to post a message on Twitter Wednesday (2/8), reading simply "home," with a link to a YouTube video which showed the performer in his bedroom, promising to release a new song if he gained 50,000 Twitter followers that day. A few hours later, after achieving that goal, he released the new song, as promised, on his website.

Speculation on Sweatshirt's situation had grown to a fever pitch among Odd Future fans in recent months, after the rapper went missing following the debut of the then-16-year-old's debut album, "Earl," in 2010. Although he later confirmed that he was enrolled at Samoa's Coral Reef Academy -- a residential school for troubled youths -- Odd Future seemed to embrace and even willingly agitate the brewing controversy, crossing out his name on a flyer for the group's first proper hometown concert in July 2010, at West Hollywood's Key Club, and scribbling in "Will not be there due to mom." The group's "Free Earl" crescendo reached its peak just before the New Yorker piece appeared in May of last year, when Sweatshirt claimed he was at the school of his own volition and asked fans to stop vilifying his mother.