Six years since their last major release, Death Grips continues to be one of the most polarizing things in modern music. To appreciate why, throw a dart at their tracklist, pop on some headphones, and report back. Hip-hop, industrial music, noise, glitch-pop, and electronic music don’t belong together in a complementary way, yet Death Grips force them like repelling magnets into an unnatural whole. Their music screams and spasms like some tortured organism forced to live in a space where it cannot naturally survive.

The trio is far from the first to experiment with concatenating sounds or images that would rather be a million miles apart, but Death Grips has kept at the bleeding edge of the ugly and abrasive for over a decade. Stephan Burnett, Andy Morin, and Zach Hill have a special knack for finding sweet slices of art in abhorrent audiovisual mixtures.

In this article, I’m going to explore their diverse and strange art. During my analysis, I have arrived at the conclusion that their art falls into three categories. In the Death Grips’ spirit, I will give them obscure and inscrutable names: Kuiper, Tor, and Zugzwang.

Kuiper

A common critique of Death Grips has always been that it’s all random, incoherent nonsense. There is some truth to this. There’s plenty of incoherence in their body of work, but I feel I must counter that with the points that 0 is a number, nothing is definitionally something, and nonsense is sense in the right context.

Disorienting nonsense is the point of Kuiper art. It should look as if an intelligent entity from beyond the Kuiper belt beamed us their art. Or like a camera has dipped beyond some event horizon and captured an out-of-bounds zone where nothing makes any sense.

Kuiper often uses repeating textures that follow a sensible geometric shape. The artist - who I believe is more often than not, the drummer and producer Zach Hill - plays with quite basic tools to achieve these alien effects, like enlarging, shrinking, inverting, copying & pasting, liquifying, mirroring, and more.

The effect is to convey an indistinct, placeless, and senseless state. Distortions in the mind and environment. The loss of the self. Confusion over what is real. This effect is mirrored in their production and lyrics where paranoia, delusions, and a vanishing sense of self are explored.

In the following song, The Powers That B, vocalist and writer MC Ride (Stephan Burnett) assumes the role of a character who is arguably having a manic episode. Delusions of grandeur, allyship with some ill-defined “powers that be”, violence, and hatred toward normal people on this normal planet - these are the themes. We’re cowards, repulsive and irredeemable, played like puppets on strings by him and the “powers that be”. He’s super cool though. Totally not screaming all of this in a car park on a Tuesday evening.

In this next song, placelessness and senselessness are explored in the production rather than the lyrics. Behind Ride’s vocals, there’s a violent speaker interference noise - the kind that we cover our ears from when we plug speakers in. Over that is a simple naked drum beat and a wailing Björk sample. Suddenly, at 1:48, it comes to an abrupt stop as the last rubber band of sanity keeping this whole thing together snaps and the music becomes what their Kuiper art looks like - an offputting look into a sinister and bizarre zone of nonsense.

Tor

The internet, with all of its anonymity and niche community spaces, has been attracting the weird, the creepy, and the monstrous for decades. This has given us an online culture fascinated with “Creepy Pastas”, urban legends, weird media, and honest-to-God horrors.

At some point or other, we’ve all seen some benign image that makes us wonder: where was that taken? Why was that uploaded? Who is that? What are they doing? The internet loves this kind of out-of-context media. It feels like it’s trying to tell a story about someone, what they do, how they live, and who they are. The more bizarre the images the more we’re fascinated by them.

I think this is related to a feeling many of us share where, disregarding any actual threat to ourselves, would be kind of thrilled to learn that our neighbor was a criminal mastermind or a famous freak. This out-of-context media makes us aware that they live amongst us. We might feel paranoid and uncomfortable with this realization, and these feelings are explored repeatedly throughout Death Grip’s discography

This band has been exploring the dark aspects of internet culture since their inception in 2010. In I’ve Seen Footage MC Ride raps and raves about the terrible things he’s witnessed on the internet. It seems like now everyone is an ad hoc videographer with a motivation to capture the horrors around them which once seen are seldom forgotten. This is summed up nicely in the lines “Desensitized by the mass amounts of shit. I’ve seen it, I’ve been it. Can’t delete it, feels like jail”. He goes on to talk about his burgeoning paranoia after witnessing these clips that litter the internet.

It goes without saying that when Death Grips upload or share visual media it’s strictly that kind of media that makes you wonder, rather than horrifying you. Death Grips is an artistic band that provokes through their lyrics and style rather than perpetuating anything objectionable.

Again and again, they bring to mind those photos from ancient message boards of a person with a bewildering array of items. Who? Why? What? Where? How did you get that?

Zugzwang

During a game of chess, you’re said to be in Zugzwang when every move available to you is bad for you. Putting your opponent in Zugzwang is the highest level of achievement during a game. The level of ugliness that Death Grips achieves with some of their art is exquisite. It's in an ugly Zugzwang where anything you could do to it either has no effect or makes it less ugly.

This image above is a delicate balance, as delicate as pure beauty. We could throw streaks of paint across it, or turn that awful brown oval into a cringy pink star from primary school and make the text diagonal, but it wouldn’t actually make it uglier.

Consider this, if you asked an artist to draw the ugliest person they could imagine and they gave you a drawing of a cabbage, you’d be annoyed, because it isn’t a person. For what they attempt to achieve, depict, or inspire in you, I think they achieve it with accuracy. And to make any alteration would either make it less ugly or turn it into something else inspiring different feelings.

Ugliness is not a prominent feature of their music, but it does fit their modus operandi of being provoking, challenging, and unpalatable.

I’m not a music historian, but I think that Bob Dylan’s famous mockery of and toying with interviewers’ questions was the beginning of trendy aloofness and mystique among certain musicians.

Interviewer: “Do you think of yourself primarily as a singer or a poet?”
Bob Dylan: “I think of myself more as a song and dance man.”

Musicians have been chasing that cool, profitable mystique ever since, but the methods have changed since Bob’s time. A few decades ago the cool thing was to act like you don’t care. Turn up to interviews moments after your last puff or injection, in a reverie of synthetic joy and look blankly at the dry old jobsworth trying his best to ask you some bullshit.

After that, the go-to method of developing mystique and identity was to ignore absolutely everyone, do no interviews, and only materialize to deploy new music. Death Grips were among the first to go about this, and being pioneers of the “dropped-off-the-face-of-the-Earth” method of PR their particular strategy was home-grown, fresh, experimental, and hard to imitate.

Part of their strategy was all of this ugliness. The ugliness was a way of saying “We don’t care. The cover doesn’t matter. The video doesn’t matter. The font doesn’t matter. Our hair doesn’t matter. Our pictures don’t matter. Our clothes don’t matter. Our teeth don’t matter. Our skin doesn’t matter.” This is punk through and through, really. They don’t care about their image - which itself is their image, which they care very much about. 0 is a number, senselessness is sense and all that.

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