From their very beginnings, Death Grips always sounded like a group far-flung from some alternate future, even when their touchpoints were rooted in a firm past. Though most of their early work was built off samples of rock and pop icons like Pink Floyd, Bad Brains, Nancy Sinatra, and Link Wray, the way they warped and inverted the samples into noisy infernos felt like an alien production language of their own. Their atypical configuration — one MC by the name of Stefan Burnett (or Ride), one producer (Andy Morin), and a live drummer (Zach Hill of Hella) — was compounded by their arresting sound, which could and did vary intensely with every passing release. At their earliest, you could be hearing the industrial garbles of what sounded like Burnett screaming over a fax machine beat on "Face Melter (How To Do Impossible Things)," and then the very next year, you'd be walking face-first into billowing pillars of bass tones and skittering V-drum hi-hats on "Come Up And Get Me."
For years, this was one of the prime joys of following Death Grips. The band's sound truly seemed like it could be anything at any given moment, as long as it maintained the relentless, visceral intensity of everything that came before. Or, to quote Burnett in one of the few interviews the group ever gave: "We're not into lateral movement — you know, stepping side-to-side. We want to move forward."
And so, Death Grips continued this philosophy so thoroughly that they applied it to the concept of a double album itself. Though The Powers That B’s official release in full through Harvest was 10 years ago today, the most pronounced thing about it to anyone who threw it even a sideways glance was its bifurcation. Like many of the band's early records, the first disc of the record (N****s On The Moon, henceforth referred to with the acronym NOTM) was surprise-released on June 8, 2014, with a brief note that it was part of a double album to be completed later that year.
And then came the long, protracted wait for Jenny Death, the second half of the record. You can measure almost as many events in the interim as there were months that passed — cryptic "breakup" posts on napkins, an interstitial instrumental album most notable for its troll move of a tracklist, countless upon countless fake leaks and subreddit cope-posting theories predicting release dates before the end of 2014 as promised. (My favorite iteration of these: fans insistent Jenny Death would drop on whenever the next full moon was due. Eventually, it didn't even drop on a full moon at all.) And that's before the onslaught of infamous "maybe they want us to make Jenny Death ourselves" posts.
Maybe it was always meant to be that a record of this scope from a band this serrated and unknowable would be intentionally at odds with itself. Even if both halves of the record came out at the same time — or with less time between each — that wouldn't have made the clear sonic divide between each disc any less dramatic. NOTM shares the most in common with Death Grips' colder, more barren records like No Love Deep Web or Government Plates, but its sound feels singularly haunted, its beats primarily made up of chopped phantom Björk samples (acting as the band's "found object") triggered by Hill operating a V-drum kit. Meanwhile, Jenny Death is the opposite: like the band's pipe bomb approach to upending rock music on Exmilitary taken even further to its logical endpoint, more blown-out and enveloping than ever. In a way, it's fitting that both records ended up being released as distinct entities, but ones whose fullest virtues could only be identified when placing them in conversation with each other.
The concept of a multi-LP record having a clear sonic division between discs wasn't totally new — Ummagumma, Tago Mago, All Things Must Pass, and Speakerboxxx/The Love Below all deliberately cleaved their tracklists in some fashion, allowing themselves to roam in directions beyond the space of a single disc. But even in the context of those records, Death Grips' execution on The Powers That B is still so unusual, leaning into its own discongruities until they form the core text of the album.
NOTM was always the disc that hypnotized me most, even as it seemed to grow deceptively murkier with each listen. Right at the top, "Up My Sleeves" presents perhaps the knottiest the group ever got: its alternating, doomy smacks of bass drums and snares keep pace with wind tunnels of echoing, glitching Björk howls, but the lyrics are… disarming, to say the least. Outside of this record, Burnett never really wrote with this kind of frankness, one wherein his very first words are a candid admission of suicidal ideation: "I'll take my life like I kept it/ Up my sleeves." That Burnett references his own verbose crypticism is especially fascinating; "Up My Sleeves" is fairly transparent in its thematic matter, compounding those opening lines with turns of phrase like "quench my hearse," imagery of blank obituaries at Broadway cemetery, and, most potently, Burnett rapping about "my dead mother in my dreams." There's a palpable obsession with mortality throughout the song, simultaneously a compulsion toward it and a grave fear of it. Or, in Burnett's words, it's a "fetish" that can only be torn away from him by force.
The rest of NOTM unfolds like a single unified piece, each track relentlessly tumbling into the next, implicitly weaving together the various lyrical fixations Burnett flits between. His aura remains so stricken by death on "Billy Not Really" that a medium won't even approach him ("treats me like a meteor"), while his erotic outlets toward the end of this track reach full-on avoidant grief mechanisms on the twofer of "Have A Sad Cum BB" and "Fuck Me Out." By the time the disc's closer "Big Dipper" comes around, these miasmas of loathing have finally merged into a single form, one where Burnett is, among other things, lambasting himself as a "shitty stripper." If there's a pervasive thread throughout NOTM, it's the ways our inner despairs are diffused into anything but whatever we must confront. Or, in Burnett's own words on "Big Dipper": "denial pays placebo bot."
Beyond this conceptual slant, though, it still astounds me just how much NOTM sounds like Death Grips on another level entirely. The cohesion of vision is as locked-in as anything they've ever made, but the contributions everyone brings to the table feel richer for appreciation than ever. At the core of it, Burnett's lyricism on this disc is astoundingly dense, littered with internal rhymes and alliteration and consonance, to the point where it sometimes renders his style purely impressionistic. On "Black Quarterback," he depicts spittle down a racist police officer's shirt with the grotesquely vivid "swine must be all the way hatched, hella yolk raining down his chest." "Voila" invents a nesting doll of portmanteaus, with Burnett always returning to the phrase "My propa-voila-shadow-ganda." But particularly striking is Burnett's tongue-twister delivery on a jarring beat shift late in "Billy Not Really":
I man tsunami feral, get barreled in other worlds
No hand in sea of pearls, buried in frozen Jheri curls
I man Herzog shooting solitaire
No hands, savoir nova shaka glare Zulu somnambulist lair
Hill and Morin's parts do just as much heavy lifting in making space for the suffocating atmosphere for Burnett's wordplay. While Hill's drums are just as technically impressive as his typical style — his penchant for speedy beats riding the hi-hat on "Billy Not Really" and "Voila" never lose their allure — Morin renders them as if in a deafening isolation chamber, each bass rattle bone-thrumming. But Morin also leaves just enough negative space in the mix, especially in quieter moments, creating something paradoxically cacophonous and void-like.
Where all these elements come to a head is on NOTM’s closer "Big Dipper." Burnett, tipping his hand to another past reference point, offers a riff on Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" but warps and redirects that song's wallowing: "This pyre's my costume/ Get too close, it'll lick you/ Like it likes you/ Cause it loathes you/ Even more than I do." And, just like that, he vanishes from the track, at the precise moment his vitriol turns from himself to another. In the subsequent minutes spent in the solitude of Hill's V-drum solo and a dense barrage of Björk samples, the pointed gesture of Burnett's sudden absence lingers. It's a break in the self-destructive cycles of the disc, and what follows shifts under the band's feet accordingly.
Given how NOTM sits so atypically in Death Grips' discography, Jenny Death and its high-energy bombardment of clarion synths and seismic guitars should, on paper, feel more in line with records like Exmilitary, or even the group's debut self-titled EP. But the only real thematic mirror for the disc is NOTM. On its surface, disc opener "I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States" should be the kind of aggression-fueled kiss-off that made something like "Come Up And Get Me" a jackhammer to the skull. But its lyrics are closer to "Up My Sleeves" than anything else, with Burnett offering a dejected "I don't care about real life" as a counter-refrain to the song's title, violently retaliating against his own image. The self-loathing, the desperation, the wielding of the erotic as an extension of the morbid ("snatch my fetish" finding a mirror in "we sniff and clutch each other's fates") — these elements are present in both discs' openers. The band's thread of outré assertion is back in full force on Jenny Death, but the words themselves can't shake the ghosts of what came before.
Jenny Death often tends to be cast as a kind of culmination for everything Death Grips had been building up to by then, and that's before even taking into account that it says as much by ending with an outro titled "Death Grips 2.0." It offers a kind of definitive statement on what the group had been, from the exhaustive laundry list of influences dotting a verse of "Inanimate Sensation," to the liberal deployment of callbacks — including, at one point, a callback to "Have A Sad Cum BB," which appeared a mere eight songs earlier in the tracklist. It's the kind of Big Record where Death Grips afford themselves the scope to reckon with their — frankly — bizarrely fast underground rise, and whether there would be any future where they could take the project.
It's in this context that penultimate track "On GP" makes for an even more surprising, uncharacteristic highlight than anything on NOTM. If "Up My Sleeves" was a morose coming-to-terms with our own deaths and the dangerous prospect of our fates resting in our own hands, "On GP" is the decisive moment Burnett comes to after sitting on that knowledge the entire double album. It's here where the drift that Jenny Death makes toward guitar riffs from Nick Reinhart — an element I volley back and forth on the effectiveness of elsewhere — lands at its most evocative, all washed in weary distortion, like staring directly into a pale sun during a depressive episode. Burnett's lyrics themselves are downright sobering, offering no veneer of metaphor or elaborate symbolism. When he does present the matter figuratively, it's maybe the bluntest set of lines in Death Grips' catalog: Death arriving at his doorstep, handing Burnett his scythe and telling him, "Use at your own discretion/ It's been a pleasure, Stefan." The whole thing rings with a startling sincerity for Death Grips, its ultimate resolve toward living for others becoming not just an endpoint for the record's arc, but a definitively earnest thesis for the project as a whole.
But there also exists a kind of macro-culmination to another thread present throughout Death Grips' time: their relationship to authority, both within the confines of their songwriting and in the band's metatext. Not for nothing, but "Klink" off Exmilitary is about as clearheaded of an anti-police tirade as anything in rap's storied history, and we are talking about the group that famously blew up their contract with Epic Records in under than a year with the most rebellious dick pic of their time. This angle is established, albeit obliquely, on NOTM, with both "Black Quarterback" and "Say Hey Kid" offering narratives about how obedience to authority figures is complicated through race. Jenny Death underlines this point even louder: shortly after Burnett decries someone "doing peace signs with the FBI" on "Pss Pss," "The Powers That B" sees him subverting the very structures that would otherwise subjugate him and assert himself into dominance. To take the interpretation one level deeper, this thread in Jenny Death offers, perhaps, a kind of retroactive explanation for what compounds the despondencies present in NOTM — how could a person not feel this way, when pressed into submission by forces that claim control over them?
How, too, could Death Grips ever escape the weight of their own listening body? At the time of writing, the band may very well be over, at least for now, if leaked purported messages with Morin hold any truth. Though not mentioned explicitly, this came shortly after an arduous number of incidents from the band's increasingly unruly fan community during their 2023 tour. I've been invested in Death Grips long enough to have known its crowds have a history of being… a bit much. But I imagine these recent instances would make it especially hard to advocate for touring more, knowing that the people most likely to turn up are more concerned with their crude displays of affinity than meaningful celebration of the music itself.
In this regard, it feels oddly poignant that this happens to be the Death Grips record celebrating a tenth anniversary this year, in that its very presence is a form of eulogy-in-motion at the end of the band's most unpredictable — and, arguably — most impactful years. Here, on The Powers That B, we see a band coming up against the distinct possibility that they may have run their course, quite possibly while making the record. And what results is a reckoning of where they have been, what they have carved, and what more they have left to say if this truly was to be the end. The sincerest expressions come when someone believes they may be their last.
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