Death Grips // Bottomless Pit

,

.

was the five-headed lion roar that complemented my ecstatic confidence and excitement at the blossoming of newfound love. Then, in March 2015, they released the second half of the album, and the summer of 2015 saw me consuming the full album in fiery blasts as an antidote to post-breakup depression, when I didn’t feel like wallowing in it with the likes of

and

.

it from their Facebook page).

[caption id=”“]

Death Grips. L to R: Zach Hill, MC Ride, Flatlander.[/caption]

more than delivers.

[caption id=”“]

Pure noise and dreck. Try “Life Kicks!” instead.[/caption]

Death Grips’ often-conflicting qualities of dissonance/mayhem and memorability/likability come together beautifully in the album’s lead single, “Hot Head.” In the verses, Zach Hill’s wild, meterless drumbeats steamroll toward oblivion, while Flatlander revs the racecar-like synths that have become one of his trademarks, and MC Ride shouts incoherent absurdist lines like “My cobra head draped in mota/Hooded regime like ebola.” The chorus then breaks down suddenly into a relatively slow 4/4 beat while Flatlander rolls out descending minor arpeggios from a synth that sounds like it could have come out of some low-budget 80s sci-fi film. It’s in this chorus that Ride declares: “What’d you tell them? I just told them hell’s existence. But you know me, don’t nobody know my business.” In the midst of this inscrutable, fascinating killer of a song is a kind of mission statement: Ride is not here to bare you a piece of his soul, but to remind you that hell is real. As if anyone were doubting his intentions.

[embed

The whole album is a high-energy, high-octane whirlwind that ebbs, flows, and always keeps you excited and hungry for more. The opener, “Giving Bad People Good Ideas,” sounds like a morbidly satisfying blast of ultraviolent, pummeling industrial black metal. In “Spikes,” Flatlander’s slimy synths and Zach Hill’s manic percussion create a wild, dissonant background for, surprisingly, one of the catchiest hooks on the album. The bouncy “Eh” ventures a bit out of typical Death Grips territory with a major-key synth hook and lyrics that manage to be legitimately hilarious while still retaining Death Grips’ trademark nihilism. The energy is so high you’d think Death Grips consumed nothing but Red Bull and speed while recording this album.

[embed

“Ring a Bell” bursts into one of the more “metal” songs on the album, with distorted guitars that redefine the word “heavy”—but then Ride spits in the face of that white-dominated genre when the music cuts out for him to bellow the opening line: “America, America, now I’m coming Africa, my death is money!” Death Grips have never been overtly political—more like anti-political—but still the anti-colonialist, anti-racist sentiment comes through strongly.

to distorted guitar. Ride concludes the song (and the album) with a repeated threat too ridiculous to be true: “I’ll fuck you in half.” Are we meant to laugh? Absolutely, but that doesn’t have to prevent us from feeling the power of Ride’s vocal presence as this final track assaults our ears.

[embed

The silly closing line also shows the essence of the nihilism of Death Grips. “Why are they so angry?” people sometimes ask when they hear their music. The thing is, Death Grips don’t need a reason, nor does anyone, to be angry when living in a world full of suffering where no one exists on purpose, no one has control over their lives, and nothing is guaranteed to have any significance. To be angry about anything is ridiculous and unproductive, but we do it anyway, and it’s how we get by. So we shout along to MC Ride: “I’ll fuck you in half,” and then we laugh. It’s all we can do.

This album is one of the most purely enjoyable releases Death Grips have ever produced. They can always be relied upon to deliver the energy, charisma, power, and nerve it takes to make an album like this, but not since The Money Store have they jammed those qualities into such a tight and listenable package. We should feel privileged that a band so important and relevant to modern music has made an album so riotously fun for our enjoyment. They don’t owe us anything, since their discography is already so full of great accomplishments, but now they’ve given us another addictive and raucous album to be a soundtrack to this next summer and many, many summers to come.

BEST TRACKS: 2, 3, 5, 4, 1, 10, 13

RIYL: Hella, Swans, Run the Jewels

GRADE: A

Bottomless Pit was released on May 6 on Third Worlds. You can stream it from Death Grips’ official YouTube account.

Jeff Holland is a freshman. He has a radio show for dark music called Purge Ur Demons on Monday nights from 8-9 and a show for non-a cappella music called Songs A Cappella Groups Would Never Sing (co-hosted with Eric Benoit and Nell Sather) on Wednesday nights from 7-8. He will be music director in spring 2017 along with Maddy Goodhart.