Death Grips
Formed in 2010, the Sacramento, California trio Death Grips had a gigantic impact on the music of the following years, very quickly becoming the most popular experimental hip-hop project of all time. From the start, the core of their sound was the hardcore punk intensity of virtuoso drummer Zach Hill—already a legendary figure in leftfield rock circles at the time, known for his work in the math-rock stalwart Hella and endless smaller projects, including collaborations with Chino Moreno of Deftones and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of At the Drive In and The Mars Volta. Death Grips pioneeringly combined it with Hill's and producer Andy 'Flatlander' Morin's hyperkinetic, futuristic production that owed a debt to extreme club music; as well as the paranoid, often incoherently screamed poetry of rapper MC Ride, the face and heart of the group. The result of their coming together was music with a post-Internet, schizoid feel of information overload, heightened by the trio's mysterious aura and penchant for deceiving their fans.
Death Grips officially debuted in 2011 with the mixtape Exmilitary; this project, based largely on brash samples from an array of rock music ranging from Link Wray to Black Flag, generated a gigantic amount of critical hype around the group and secured them a contract with Epic Records. Not for long, as after the release of their first LP for Epic—their dystopian magnum opus The Money Store—Death Grips breached the terms of their contract by releasing their next album, No Love Deep Web, as a free download, adding insult to injury with the use of a picture of Hill's penis as the cover. After the above three releases, and with living legend status in hand (largely due to the meme status they had achieved on 4chan's music board), the band went in a more esoteric direction with their next album Government Plates, introducing elements of high-octane European club music into their sound and promoted with a single featuring their friend and A-list actor Robert Pattinson. Their next release was The Powers That B, released in two parts over the course of a year and the group's alleged split in the interim—with one half built fully from specially provided samples of Björk's voice, played on electronic percussion by Hill, and the other flirting with the drummer's rock roots. Death Grips' two most recent LPs—Bottomless Pit (2016) and Year of the Snitch (2018)—have consolidated their sound and presented the trio as a now somewhat mature project, if that word is even applicable to them. In addition to the aforementioned albums, Death Grips have also released an endless number of smaller releases, often unannounced, pseudonymous and formally loose.
About Death Grips
Formed in 2010, the Sacramento, California trio Death Grips had a gigantic impact on the music of the following years, very quickly becoming the most popular experimental hip-hop project of all time. From the start, the core of their sound was the hardcore punk intensity of virtuoso drummer Zach Hill—already a legendary figure in leftfield rock circles at the time, known for his work in the math-rock stalwart Hella and endless smaller projects, including collaborations with Chino Moreno of Deftones and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of At the Drive In and The Mars Volta. Death Grips pioneeringly combined it with Hill's and producer Andy 'Flatlander' Morin's hyperkinetic, futuristic production that owed a debt to extreme club music; as well as the paranoid, often incoherently screamed poetry of rapper MC Ride, the face and heart of the group. The result of their coming together was music with a post-Internet, schizoid feel of information overload, heightened by the trio's mysterious aura and penchant for deceiving their fans.
Death Grips officially debuted in 2011 with the mixtape Exmilitary; this project, based largely on brash samples from an array of rock music ranging from Link Wray to Black Flag, generated a gigantic amount of critical hype around the group and secured them a contract with Epic Records. Not for long, as after the release of their first LP for Epic—their dystopian magnum opus The Money Store—Death Grips breached the terms of their contract by releasing their next album, No Love Deep Web, as a free download, adding insult to injury with the use of a picture of Hill's penis as the cover. After the above three releases, and with living legend status in hand (largely due to the meme status they had achieved on 4chan's music board), the band went in a more esoteric direction with their next album Government Plates, introducing elements of high-octane European club music into their sound and promoted with a single featuring their friend and A-list actor Robert Pattinson. Their next release was The Powers That B, released in two parts over the course of a year and the group's alleged split in the interim—with one half built fully from specially provided samples of Björk's voice, played on electronic percussion by Hill, and the other flirting with the drummer's rock roots. Death Grips' two most recent LPs—Bottomless Pit (2016) and Year of the Snitch (2018)—have consolidated their sound and presented the trio as a now somewhat mature project, if that word is even applicable to them. In addition to the aforementioned albums, Death Grips have also released an endless number of smaller releases, often unannounced, pseudonymous and formally loose.
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