Death Grips: Year of the Snitch [HARVEST/THIRD WORLDS]

Why you'll love it

This is the 2018 Third Worlds and Harvest LP, MC Ride, Zach Hill and Andy Morin at their most playful and unhinged. Turntablist DJ Swamp and Tool bassist Justin Chancellor join in, and "Black Paint" and "Streaky" are among the band's most immediate songs.

About the album

Death Grips have never been big on the conventional album rollout. The Sacramento trio announced Year of the Snitch with a plain black and white notice on their website, then revealed the tracklist in a video of text messages arriving on an iPhone, ringtones and all, with MC Ride screaming in the background.

The new collaborators were an unexpected crew. Turntablist DJ Swamp is all over the record, Tool's Justin Chancellor plays bass, Australian noise artist Lucas Abela adds his own brand of chaos, and New Zealand film director Andrew Adamson turns up too, even appearing in the video for "Dilemma." "Streaky" came out first, then the punk-rock rush of "Black Paint," the wonky "Flies" and the mad cackle of "Hahaha," while "Death Grips Is Online" opens things with a jolt and "Disappointed" closes them with a howl.

It's the band's most cartoonish and colourful record, packed with jump cuts, piano stabs and drum fills from Zach Hill that seem to arrive from several directions at once. The man who directed Shrek is on a Death Grips album, which is the sort of sentence we never expected to type and are delighted to have typed.

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Tracklist

Listen

On Third Worlds / Harvest (cat# 2567785408), the 2018 album.