Many rappers with the background of IDK would have been much more forthcoming about it in their music for the sake of street credibility. His life of crime in his teenage years led to a warrant for his arrest, cops kicking down his door, and several stints of incarceration, with street rappers like Yo Gotti and Gucci Mane as the soundtrack for his life. But he spent much of his rap career in the late 2010s drawing comparisons to rappers like Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar, making conceptual records meditating on religion (Is He Real?) and familial trauma (USEE4YOURSELF) instead of focusing on his years in the street. Tough to blame him for wanting to move on from it: He spent his time in prison helping other incarcerated people get their GEDs, and he eventually launched a music business boot camp at Harvard University. “A lot of rap artists are known for exaggerating their life to be a little harder than it was,” IDK tells Apple Music. “I was exaggerating my life to be less hard than it may have been. I was more like, ‘Yo, I’m in college, man. I don’t deal with no gun stuff.’” But for e.t.d.s. (Even the Devil Smiles), he shamelessly leans into his past: Had he served his entire 15-year prison sentence, 2025 would have been when he got out. Another conceptual effort, the mixtape finds him getting introspective about the crime-ridden years of his youth. He’s neither glamorizing his criminal past nor being preachy about it. But his memories from that time of his life are clear, and his emotions are even clearer. “It’s not a big deal to tap back in and relive certain things, especially if I have a conversation with someone who knew me back then,” he says. “My mind’s like a hard drive: I put it in the trash, in 30 days it goes away, and sometimes people download the information back into my mind.” “SCARY MERRi” puts a Frankensteinian flip on a Christmas jingle as IDK relives mischievous breaking-and-entering robberies, while “C.O.P” captures the rebellious, anti-authority attitude of his youth. It’s not all excitement, though: “CELL BLOCK FREESTYLE / CD ON” has worries about finding a job once he gets out, and somber album closer “SCRAMBLED EGGS - TBC :(” finds him lamenting his crimes and pondering whether karma will catch up to him. The mixtape also has plenty of star power attached—a result of what IDK simply calls the “audacity” to reach out to people. He trades bars with the late MF DOOM on “FLAKKA” (their third song together), lands a posthumous DMX chorus on “START TO FiNISH - S.T.F,” and nabs prestigious guest verses from Pusha T, Black Thought, and RZA. Beats are handled by the likes of KAYTRANADA, No ID, Daoud, Conductor Williams, and IDK himself. “I come into that album very aggressive, and I leave very vulnerable,” he says. “That is how prison can be for a lot of people. The problem is, people judge the person based off of the circumstances. What I want people to get out of this is the importance of redemption, and the importance of giving people who have been in situations like that purpose. The person that’s going into prison is not always the person that comes out, and we need to be able to acknowledge that.”