Her presence on the album is, similar to Venus Williams' guttural cries sampled on The Money Store cut "System Blower", mangled and distorted beyond recognition. "i adore death grips and i am thrilled to be their 'found object' !" The phrase "found object" suggests that she wasn't so much an active artistic partner as much as a passive supplier of source material, another sound thrown into Death Grips' culture-wiping meat grinder. "i am proud to announce my vocals landed on the new death grips album !" she exclaimed in an official statement the day after Niggas on the Moon dropped. An eight-track release that stands as Death Grips' shortest effort to date, Niggas on the Moon comes bearing a title that possibly references Gil Scott-Heron, along with claims of a high-profile collaborator: Björk, who's no stranger when it comes to working with inhumanly talented drummers from the noise scene.īut nothing is quite as it seems in Death Grips' world, so within 24 hours of Niggas on the Moon's release it emerged that rumors of Björk's contributions may have been greatly exaggerated. Like its predecessor, Government Plates was released suddenly for nothing-and so it goes, too, with Niggas on the Moon, the project's latest missive that arrived last Sunday evening. Last year's Government Plates headed even further into left-of-center territory, drawing inspiration from the glitchy terror of IDM's more aggressive elements. Rather than capitalize on the comparatively bright accessibility of The Money Store, it suggested Death Grips were prepared to get weirder. It's a thick, sludgy record in which the group's wild-eyed mouthpiece Stefan Burnett sounds like he's trapped in hell, dragging himself through a landscape of destruction. Quite possibly the most dissonant album ever recorded at the Chateau Marmont, NO LOVE DEEP WEB found Death Grips doubling down on sonic viscera.
Walk the moon album cover art free#
Later that year, NO LOVE DEEP WEB arrived without warning and free of charge, triggering a well-documented war between Death Grips and their cash-flow overlords. A thrilling document of puckered melody and blue-screen-of-death chaos that stands as the project's strongest release to date, The Money Store resembled the revolting, ultra-violent conclusion to director Nicolas Winding Refn's Pusher films: a dead body hung upside down, its contents drained and shoved into a garbage disposal. The former is a funny image, the latter ostensibly a tasteless joke, but upon engaging with The Money Store, all attendant information becomes irrelevant. Reid air-drummed to the band's music upon signing and compared them to Whitney Houston.
At the time, band mastermind Zach Hill-a veteran drummer who, after a decade-plus of alternating between the roles of reliable sideman and unsung noise-scene hero, has undoubtedly benefited the most from Death Grips' notoriety- claimed that label honcho L.A. Their first record, 2011's Exmilitary, remains their most overlooked work even as it represents Death Grips at their most elemental, a potent, nasty mix of blasted rap figures, percussive mania, and corroded noise that smacked of a modern-day Judgment Night soundtrack featuring collaborations beteween Dälek and Lightning Bolt.Ī year later, Death Grips returned with The Money Store, a dizzying rush of an album with a title that likely referenced the group's short-lived major-label contract with Epic. Their actions have scanned as humorous, aggressive, contemptible, and puerile- sometimes all at once-and despite any high-minded claims, the ends to the means have been excellent promotion for a body of work that's proved increasingly confounding. The shifting collective-sometimes a trio, occasionally a duo, and at one point consisting of no members at all-have spent the last two years staging a public, low-level coup on people's attention spans that, in terms of subversiveness, has fallen somewhere between egging someone's house and stealing your neighbor's WiFi. If you need proof that "bad press" as a concept is largely a thing of the past, look no further than Death Grips.