For the most part, I like simple pleasures, like lollipops in my mouth, butter in my ass, and distorted guitars in my music. My boo is gnarly guitar rock. I love her with all the heart and we have a healthy, disgusting sex life.
But every now and then, the perverts from other genres create something so filthy that I can’t help but stray.
In the 2007, Justice released Cross, whose Moogs sound dirtier than a pig in mud. Despite being largely instrumental, Cross is the nastiest disco album of all time (apologies to Betty Davis, whose 1975 album Nasty Gal would probably make the top ten.) Justice make fellow countrymen Daft Punk sound like CCM.
In 2009, Kanye West led me astray with his luxurious, indulgent My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Back then Kanye seemed like an HBO anti-hero instead of a YouTube villain, and his combination of expensive samples, trashy rap, and narcissistic introspection felt new and exciting. Fans who still defend West – who, at this point, has more in common with his sometime-inspiration Adolph Hitler than any actual, normal person – probably started getting laid when “Runaway” took over the world. You’ll have to trust me. It was a big deal.
The early 2010s coincided with an era of indie rock in which the noisiest bad guys felt more like bad boys. Wavves and No Age embraced the volume of noise rock, but not the darkness. I don’t know if any band can truly dabble in the dark arts if one of their biggest influences is the Beach Boys.
Even dedicated Jesus Lizard fanboys like Men and Pissed Jeans, who reveled in making nasty noise, didn’t actually commit to the nihilism of their soundscapes. Hell, after three albums, Men proclaimed their affection for Tom Petty and Pissed Jeans were still whining about inconveniences so minor they wouldn’t make a Curb Your Enthusiasm C-plot.
What I mean is that they weren’t making serious music.
I dunno, man. It was the Obama years. You were hardcore if you made a nasty sounding song about how ice cream tastes good.
I say this as a preamble to explain how primed I was to fall for Death Grips. The Sacramento trio paired the producers Zach Hill (the math-y drummer of Hella) and keyboardist Andy Morin with the elusive artist MC Ride on microphone.
Their 2011 mixtape Exmilitary introduced Death Grips fully formed. Over Hill’s live drums, Morin samples Jane’s Addiction, Pink Floyd, Link Wray, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Magma, and, uh, Pet Shop Boys. As far as I know no one actually plays guitar on the album, but it’s integral to their sound in a way that’s unlike other hip hop artists.
Although Death Grips have more in common with The Austerity Program and Couch Slut than Drake, most listeners would probably classify them as hip hop because, well, Ride has a flow like if Run-DMC were mad at you.
Ride slams lines on top of each other, rips apart words a syllable at a time, tells us to suck his dick, uses every permutation of “fuck” (most frequently unadorned as exclamation into the void), and creates hooks out of percussive fragments of words. He’s always in a bad mood, isn’t especially funny about it, and doesn’t seem to care if anyone likes him or not.
Among the sea of white boys in flannel making all their tough noise with their guitar pedals, boys who ultimately wanted nothing more than to make friends with you after their show (and maybe sell you some burned CD-Rs), I found Ride unpleasantness to be a revelation.
The early 2010s also coincided with the rise of social media, in which bands discovered that they could communicate directly with their fans. Death Grips wanted nothing to do with that. Ride told Spin in 2012, after winning their album of the year, “ I’m very distrustful of human beings in general; I’m very distrustful of media. I have no interest in sharing my personal life with the world. Zero.”
That felt like some real artist shit in an era when artists were trying to prove they were just like their fans. Death Grips rode a wave of press and support from their label Epic to land their actual debut The Money Store among the best regarded albums of 2012. The Money Store refines Exmillitary’s blazing assault, adds another layer or two to their sea of samples, and lowers Ride’s vocals just enough to make them palatable to girlfriends worldwide, who probably weren’t thrilled that The Money Store probably has more fucks-a-minute than Casino.
Around this time, Death Grips developed a reputation as a “difficult” band. They ditched an international tour to record their follow-up album and then uploaded the album on BitTorrent to bypass their label who, (probably reasonably) wanted to wait to release it until 2013. Its artwork featured a photo taken in a bathroom with the album title “No Love Deep Web” written in Sharpie on Hill’s pink boner.
Later they blew off Lollapalooza, dropped another free album Government Plates on their website, created a clutch of songs built off of julienned samples of Björk’s vocals, formed a side project The I.L.Y’s, released a free soundtrack album Fashion Week, and announced on Facebook, “We are now at our best and so Death Grips is over.”
In this crazy flurry of activity, they also released today’s Heck Record, the double album The Powers that B. About the “double album” part…Death Grips, who never take it easy on their label or fans, released discs one and two as separate entities.
The first disc features the Björk material and seems like an exercise in minimalism. Songs “Black Quarterback” or “Big Dipper” have titles that rank among the band’s best, but the songs themselves are mostly empty. Instead of writing lyrics or music, Ride and company relied on repeating phrases and glitching samplers to fill out their runtime. Disc one is among Death Grips least essential work.
Which is unfortunate, because disc two of The Powers that B is a monster.
On “Inanimate Sensation” they do the most maximalist version of my favorite thing they do. On Exmillitary’s “Guillotine” the band ride a pitch shifter so that it sounds like a jet engine taking off, as if mirroring the raising of a blade in a guillotine. “Inanimate Sensations” plays with that effect to the nth degree. They pair the pitch-shifting synth with a chorus of vocalists mimicking the same sound, as Ride hammers the chorus: “Blown out / Bass.” That’s fucking fist-pumping shit there. And I imagine that “bass” is a hat tip to Public Enemy, whose Chuck D should get royalties every time someone says “bass” with a hard B.
The rest of disc two isn’t quite as hooky as “Inanimate Sensations” but it rocks harder than anything else in their catalog. The guitars in “Turned Off” and “Why a Bitch Gotta Lie” sound like sludge metal, the synths on “Pss Pss” sound squirmy and gross, the fuzz bass brickwalls on “The Powers That B,” “Beyond Alive” begins as garage rock before dissolving into a parade of synth flutes, the cinematic “Centuries of Damn” feels like the climax of an action movie, “On GP” feels like the continuation of that climax while also getting the closest they ever get to jazz (it’s the minor seventh chords), and the glitch-crack closer “Death Grips 2.0” reads like a not-particularly-generous parody of the band overall. It wouldn’t be a Death Grips album if at least one song wasn’t mostly unlistenable.
Over the course of the album, MC Ride filters his voice to sound like a broken robot and pitch shifts it until it sounds like Cookie Monster. Honestly, you’ll probably find his best bars in the band’s first two albums, but he’s a better front man here, and makes the music sound enormous.
Death Grips released more work and toured after The Powers that B – they did not follow through with their break up – but they haven’t put out an album since 2018’s Year of the Snitch. Apparently they’re recording a new album this year.
During the more optimistic Obama years, Death Grips stuck out like a jagged piece of obsidian on a white sand beach. I’m sure that in these darker times, they won’t draw as much contrast. But that ain’t their fault. The world finally became as shitty as they always felt it was.
