Death Grips are one of the most controversial, unloveable, experimental groups in the world. And they’ve just announced an Australian tour, coming through Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane this August.
The trio of Zach Hill, Andy Morin and Stefan Burnett have been assaulting our ears for about six years, releasing challenging, aggressive and often downright terrifying music. Their last full-length release, their fifth, was Bottomless Pit, though they dropped a short mix just last month, Steroids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber Megamix). The mix pre-empted a new album which we’ll likely hear before their tour.
This marks the first Death Grips tour in about four years. I was there. I’m still recovering. I implore you to purchase tickets.
General tickets go on sale next Wednesday, June 28 at midday eastern time, while a Frontier pre-sale will be available from midday on Monday, June 26 – details here.
Death Grips Australian Tour Dates 2017
Wednesday August 2: Metro Theatre, Sydney
Friday August 4: Max Watt’s, Brisbane
Saturday August 5: Prince Bandroom, Melbourne
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orlbo9WkZ2E
Image: Supplied
Overnight, Death Grips dropped a brand new mix with no pre-announcement whatsoever. Not that this is surprising for a group who have broken up and reformed and cancelled tours and announced their demise more times than we can count.
Though it’s only 22 minutes long, it’s one of the experimental trio’s more cohesive and terrifying releases in some time – with a name like Steroids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber Megamix), we expected nothing less.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUTKTk60aGk
What we didn’t expect, was to hear some actual, straight-up bar-spitting from MC Ride – as in, cohesive verses with a trackable rhythm and an understated instrumental. Of course, the verses are bookended by more traditionally wild noise, but these little valleys of rap are a welcome new addition to their abrasive sound.
Taking to Facebook, the controversial three-piece have also confirmed that a new album is on its way, following on from last year’s chaotic Bottomless Pit.
https://www.facebook.com/deathgripz/posts/1558237187554788
Two of Death Grips’ three members, Zach Hill along with Andy morin, have also just released an album, Bodyguard, under new moniker The I.L.Y’s.
Image: Facebook
It’s not secret that Death Grips have acquired a reputation for being a little (read: completely) wild, brash and unpredictable, but their new video is something else entirely. In the latest music video from the Californian experimental hip-hop group, a poor boot gets brutally mangled and forced to sing along to the Giving Bad People Good Ideas, from their most recent album Bottomless Pit. Oh, the humanity!
The video starts with an almost surgical like dismantling of the shoe, before the brash tones of MC Ride burst onto the scene, prompting violent shaking. What follows is a harrowing and torturous death of a perfectly good boot. What else will be destroyed in the name of art?!
This latest glimpse into the weird minds of the band comes after they dropped a track with Les Claypool, about a month and a half ago. This single also featured a crazy clip, consisting of a seizure-inducing banana. Seriously, I’d love to know what these guys are on.
In more recent news, it was announced that Death Grips’ Zach Hill and Andy Morin will be co-producing a new EP from fellow Sacramento band Drug Apts. The EP will be released on Interference Pattern Records, the brainchild of LCD Soundsystem‘s Tyler Pope.
https://youtu.be/uvxkEvM81tU
Image: Consequence Of Sound
I think the world can safely assume that Death Grips are going to prevail long after every other band has broken up. The controversial experimental punk/rap group have shaken and rattled fans for what seems like years now, with constantly changing and constantly uncertain news of break-ups, reformations, ‘last ever’ albums, tours (and then intentionally-artistic cancelled tours(?) ), and more.
Their brash tunes are at times brilliant, and exceedingly difficult to digest at others, and their repertoire features an increasingly diverse list of fans and collaborators, including Bjork, not only a major fan but has who was sampled on every single track on Powers That B first half, titled Niggas On The Moon, as well Tom Morello, Tyler, The Creator and Iggy Pop, and perhaps most notably the late David Bowie, who reportedly cited them as an influence on his final album Blackstar.
Only one month after the release of Death Grips’ new album Bottomless Pit, they’ve now released a brand new track, featuring none other than Les Claypool, bassist and vocalist of legendary band Primus. It’s called More Than The Fairy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWkJghqMSpo&feature=youtu.be
If you aren’t aware of Claypool’s work with Primus or his many other musical collaborations, you will probably know him as the creator and performer of the iconic theme song to long-running cartoon South Park. For those who are aware, you’ll know that Claypool is a fucking insane bassist, undoubtedly one of the best in history.
All hell lets loose on this wild track – I have no idea how they managed to make this work, but it does. Wave after wave of extreme, frantic bass, drums, effects and vocals cascade down upon one another with absolutely no sign of slowing. It is frantic, it is chaos. And while their recent output hasn’t impressed me so much, I absolutely love this.
This is not the first time that Claypool has collaborated with Zach Hill; Claypool played bass on Hill’s debut solo album Astrological Staits way back in 2008, after meeting when Hill auditioned to play in one of Claypool’s countless side projects, Frog Brigade. In a 2014 interview Claypool recalled working with the Death Grips drummer: “[he] was so totally insane I knew he would not be able to play my songs in any other way except for Zach Hill style. So we just became friends and we kept talking about doing a project together and we still talk about doing a project together. He said, “Come play on my record.” So I showed up and basically tried to play as fast as I could trying to keep up with him.”
Image: Tucson Weekly
Death Grips have revealed the release date and lyrics to their upcoming album, Bottomless Pit.
The Sacramento group took to Twitter in March to showcase the upcoming album’s artwork and track listing, revealing that the new album would be 13 tracks long. Now, they’ve used social media once more to announce the new album details. Bottomless Pit will be out on May 6. That said, it’s Death Grips, so realistically this could mean absolutely nothing.
Death Grips also used this announcement to divulge the lyrics to Bottomless Pit, making the lyrics to all 13 tracks available online.
So far we’ve only been privy to one new track, titled Hot Head, which was released earlier this year and although from a lyrical standpoint was fairly short, it was nonetheless promising.
The band, who have garnered a reputation for being a touch odd, first announced Bottomless Pit in October last year, with a video which featured the late actress Karen Black, reading some dialogue in 2013 which was written by Zach Hill. The dialogue was initially written for a film he was working on, which Black was scheduled to appear in before tragically losing her battle with cancer that same year. Since then we’ve had the release of Hot Head, as well as an incredibly bizarre 30-minute video titled, Interview 2016, which is quite frankly unsettling.
Bottomless Pit is available digitally May 6 with pre-orders for physical copies available the same day.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQm8qpexnjo]
Image: mbssdetroit
Death Grips‘ fiery brand of hip-hop is pretty much the polar opposite of calm and soothing. Adding to an already formidable canon of bizarre user made mashups, one Reddit user has set the vocals of Death Grips’ MC Ride to computer generated muzak.
Microsoft Songsmith is a program which generates feel-good musical accompaniments to match a singer’s voice.
Considering the software’s potential, it seems like it was only a matter of time before someone started feeding through the work of famous vocalists. Now one adventurous Death Grips fan has gone as far as created a full-length LP titled Elevator Grips.
Sounding like a spontaneous Garage Band midi jam, not even Ride’s primal aggression can save his vocals from the cheesy feel of the album’s upbeat arrangements.
There’s something a little unsettling about hearing Death Grips’s profanities over the top of what sounds like a midi arrangement of The Monster Mash, but I Want It I Need It is exactly that. If that’s not to the listener’s taste the jazz-Carribean fusion of Artificial Death in the West might be more appealing.Unsettling, yet oddly addictive.
With next Grips LP Bottomless Pit still far on the horizon, Elevator Grips provides a novel alternative for hungry fans.
Read more: Death Grips have announced a new album
It’s really not easy being a Death Grips fan. The experimental hip hop/electronic group polarise audiences – not only with their brash, hard-hitting beats and aggressive rhymes, but their apparent dedication to pissing off everybody, repeatedly, in as many ways as possible.
They’ve broken up and reformed, and announced ‘final’ tours and albums more times than we can count; they’ve planned entire tours that they never intended to perform at; they’ve written break-up notes on napkins; they’ve rolled with a picture of a fully erect penis as an album cover; they’ve dropped full albums without warning; they’ve tormented the senses in more ways than we can count – and yet we keep coming back for more.
One can never be sure if Death Grips are telling the truth or not, because time and time again they’ve either let us down, or completely surprised us with full albums and so on.
They’ve now taken to Facebook to announce yet another album, Bottomless Pit, coming our way, their last release being double album The Powers That B, comprised of Niggas on the Moon (2014) and Jenny Death (2015).
The announce arrived with a 15 minute YouTube video, showing footage of an interview with late actress Karen Black, shot shortly before she passed away in 2013.
We’ve decided to make a new Death Grips album and it will be called Bottomless Pit.
Posted by Death Grips on Wednesday, 21 October 2015
Here’s the description of the video:
Iconic 70’s film star Karen Black passed away in August 2013. In February of that year, Karyn Rachtman introduced Ms. Black to Zach Hill. The two immediately hit it off. Zach had written a part for Karen for a film he was developing and gave her the pages for her scenes. Though she didn’t know how the scenes would fit into the final film, she readily agreed to read her character’s dialog on camera for Zach.
Let’s see what comes of this.
https://youtu.be/susTeQpgR9k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MHhLDCJ57E
Death Grips sure do a lot of stuff together for a band that has broken up. In fact, they do a lot of stuff for a band that HASN’T broken up. From the extensive online campaign in the lead up to their new album (as in an album made AFTER they broke up), to the supposed “leak” of said album, to now with the announcement of a world tour, fans are left scratching their heads as to whether they’ve broken up at all.
So there’s that. There’s also the past history of the Death Grips live show, in which they’ve cancelled the same number (if not more) shows than they’ve played. In one instance, they simply “chose not to show up”. Are Death Grips the greatest trolls in this modern era? Are they literally just whispering nonsense to someone to see how it spreads around the world? Because spread it does, with fans waiting for a sign from the controversial hardcore band that everything is going to be okay. Perhaps this is the sign we’re all waiting for?
Packing in a full US tour over the later days of June and most of July, the guys have also hinted at more dates to come. You can see all dates so far below, and watch this space for any further developments. I, for one, will have to see it to believe it.
Also, note the tour finishing just in time for Splendour In The Grass. Verrrry interesting!