Death Grips - Apocalypse on the web

Describing Death Grips, a Californian trio that borrows from hip-hop to make something else entirely, isn't easy: they're an acidic, deafening and disorienting concentrate of assorted sounds and noise, using the recklessness of punk, the propulsive force of electronic beats, and the cacophonous power of noise and industrial to make aggressive, hostile music, often deliberately incomprehensible in both lyrics and aesthetics. Since 2010, the year they formed in Sacramento, rapper Stefan Burnett, better known as MC Ride, drummer and producer Zach Hill, and keyboardist and producer Andy Morin have established themselves as a reference point for a musical cult fueled by memes, videos and other web content, following a dynamic essentially unprecedented in hip-hop.

Death Grips' rise within the pop culture of the era happened by shutting out every institutional channel, starting with the record industry and its traditional promotional routes. As we'll see in more detail, when they did try to find common ground with a major label, the result was a falling-out that led to an album cover that is, in fact, a dick pic. A strategy that, until just a few years earlier, would have condemned any hip-hop act to remain an underground curiosity instead turned, for Death Grips, into an unconventional path to critical acclaim and, far more surprisingly, commercial success.

The shift from obscure Californian trio to Internet icon centered around the controversial site 4chan would deserve an essay of its own. Here we can try to sum it up like this: on 4chan, a murky mix of illegality, immorality, obsession, irony and transgression finds in Death Grips an ideal synthesis, the sonic vehicle for a subculture uniting slightly odd, marginalized or troubled kids from all over the world. From 4chan, news of Death Grips' existence spread, like a virus, to other corners of the web, more or less mainstream, from Reddit and YouTube to every social network. It happens without the industry's involvement, and without the formula being smoothed out for a broader audience.

Death Grips occupy a niche that finds admirers in places far removed from their native California, from the United States itself, and even from hip-hop listeners. This happens thanks to a hyperconnected world that, by 2010, had only just become reality, through the expanding user base of giants like YouTube and Facebook (Instagram, meanwhile, had just been born). The trio bounces around these web channels with no guarantee of any context whatsoever. In the form of images, gifs and videos, they invade feeds and channels. This viral spread means that some people got to know the band not by listening to a single, an EP or an album, but through sound clips, parodies and memes. The trio's hostile, aggressive, shocking and disorienting sound is rendered even more incomprehensible, and therefore even more transgressive and hilarious, by this constant decontextualization and reinterpretation, as well as by the multiplying ways in which it could be consumed. The site Know Your Meme, which chronicles the history of that corner of the web built around memes, reconstructs part of this proliferation of content, much of which has inevitably been lost in the countless rivulets of the internet.

While other acts from the more eccentric and experimental fringes of hip-hop have found favor with a narrow circle of admirers, Death Grips unexpectedly reached a rock and metal audience too, along with lovers of all things weird, and even people who, fundamentally, have little to no interest in music at all. Given how the Internet evolved from 2010 to today, it's not paradoxical that all of this happened without them ever becoming a mainstream band.

Through a remarkably prolific output, perfectly in step with the web subculture that elevated them to icons of the 2010s, they left their mark on music in barely a decade of activity. By 2018, as we'll see, their trajectory can be considered essentially over. In February 2025, a message leaked on Instagram hinting at the band's end: a fitting conclusion for the first hip-hop act that can truly be called a creature of the Internet.

The runoff of the Internet: from formation to signing with Epic 

Zach Hill and Andy Morin had already worked together when they met Stefan Burnett. The trio officially forms on December 21, 2010, and that same day releases “Full Moon (Death Classic)”. It's hard to imagine anything more chaotic and anxiety-inducing, with a stumbling rhythm, Mc Ride howling like a man possessed, and a production that, between distortion and reverb, confuses to the point of nausea. After about two minutes, the track is hijacked for a few seconds by an apocalyptic siren at deafening volume, which returns again later on.

The EP Death Grips (2011) contains six tracks that give a fuller picture of their idea of music, which is really anti-music. The distorted guitar of “Death Grips (Next Grips)” is the pretext for an eardrum-shattering rap-rock assault, but the trio keeps changing the dynamics of its attack on the listener: through a cacophonous collage on “Face Melter (How To Do Impossible Things)”, evoking prog-rock instrumentals on “Known For It (Freak Grips)”, drowning in reverb and distorted bass on “Takyon (Death Yon)”, or stripping down to a rap-rock worthy of Run DMC on “Where’s It At (Death Heated)”.

The samples join, following a logic of disorder and unpredictability, Nancy Sinatra and Daft Punk, Beatles and Bad Brains, Magma and Pink Floyd. The EP was released for free, in a Zip archive without even track-number information: the six songs play back in simple alphabetical order.

The video for “Full Moon (Death Classic)” is the ideal completion of this assault on the senses: Mc Ride, who seems less to be rapping than suffering a nervous breakdown, alternates with footage of a bird feeding on a carcass; strobe lights and visual effects overload the viewer to the point of nauseating overstimulation. The sludge of the Internet has become music, and that music is Death Grips. If Carcass were the musical translation of gore, these three Californians are the musical translation of the most hostile, caustic, unpresentable meme culture.

They then release, again for free, the mixtape Exmilitary (2011), destined to remain the rawest snapshot of their chaotic sonic terrorism. Jane’s Addiction and Charles Manson merge in the lengthy “Beware”, almost six minutes of tension and anxiety in which the mixtape's protagonist embarks on a journey into moral depravity. The most famous single of their entire career, “Guillotine”, is their aesthetic manifesto: an obsessive nursery rhyme, with distorted electronic sounds and merciless repetition, accompanied by a video tailor-made for memes, with MC Ride rapping in a car while the video quality is progressively ravaged by degradation. It's hard to imagine packing more toxic, comic unease into less than four minutes.

The listener nonetheless keeps getting battered throughout the tracklist, bludgeoned by samples and by song structures that remain consistently chaotic and incoherent. Amid the sensory assault, traces of Black Flag surface in the racket of “Klink”, a band actually closer to their spirit than the likes of Public Enemy, Run DMC or Beastie Boys. Amid the general unpredictability, every now and then a melody or a moment of relative calm and release surfaces, but after a few minutes it's hard not to experience them as tense moments, spent waiting for the next assault.

Disturbing and nauseating in its chaotic noise, in its total disorder, Exmilitary is a collection of spasms and obsessions turned into music. What MC Ride screams, and more rarely raps, is essentially irrelevant, because what matters more is the intent and the sonic context in which it happens. This, too, as mentioned at the start, is why calling them a hip-hop group can be misleading. No fewer than eight tracks come with music videos, essential for letting the virus spread.

The trio's destructive momentum was still at full force when Epic convinced them to sign and release their first official album. As we'll see, it would prove a unique opportunity to leave a mark on the music history of the era, but also, for other reasons, the start of an irreversible path toward artistic self-destruction.

The success of The Money Store, the split with Epic, and the dick pic on the cover

The Money Store (2012) is the album of their crowning moment, the point at which, for a few months, they get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to become famous beyond their niche. There are mainly two reasons for this: one has to do with web culture, which generated an enormous amount of material featuring them and fed a bubble that was inevitably bound to burst sooner or later; the other is more strictly musical, tied to better means for shaping the musical ideas already heard on their earlier releases, without this yet amounting to any creative impoverishment. The Money Store lives off this precarious, fleeting balance, one they themselves would never manage to find again.

The disjointed assault of Exmilitary has been reshaped into a more coherent sequence of songs that overwhelms the listener. It's the same mix of electronic rhythms, hard-to-parse rap nursery rhymes, noise, sampling and distortion already heard on their earlier releases, but channeled more effectively into atypical songs running between two and three minutes.

There's an opening run that alone is enough to make The Money Store an experience with few equals: the obsessive stammering of “Get Got”, the futuristic tribalism of “The Fever (Aye Aye)”, the thriller electronics of “Lost Boys”, the hip-hop hallucination of “Blackjack”, and the more energetic, explosive “Hustle Bones” all lead into the album's most immediate track, the frenzied rap-rock of “I’ve Seen Footage”, a reimagining of Beastie Boys with an electric guitar as the backdrop for a relentlessly screaming MC Ride.

After this run of six tracks, the album has already defined its aesthetic and can afford to loosen its grip on the tense “Double Helix”, before assaulting the listener with the brostep distortion of “System Blower” or throwing them off balance with the Moroccan chaabi meets Jimi Hendrix vibe of “Punk Weight”. With eardrums more or less intact, we arrive at “Hacker”, an unexpected electro closer at harmful volume, telling the story of a cyberattack in the form of a festive threat, complete with a chorus made for shouting along:

I’m in your area, I’m in your area

I’m in your area, I’m in your area

I know the first three numbers, I’m in—

I know the first three numbers, I’m in—

I’m in your area, I’m in your area

I’m in your area, I’m in your area

I know the first three numbers, I’m in—

I know the first three numbers, I’m in—

After all, they started out on the Internet and they still feed off it. One of YouTube's most famous music critics, Anthony Fantano, awards the album one of his very rare 10/10 scores. Pitchfork, another essential reference point for web culture at the time, hails the album as a masterpiece. Some of the abrasiveness of Exmilitary has been lost, but the gain in terms of effectiveness and contagiousness is considerable: the chaotic noise of before has been channelled into bloated, deafening tracks that are nonetheless easy to memorize and hum along to, even though the ultra-violent imagery, the incomprehensible, paranoid lyrics and the obsessive repetitions suggest that doing so would be inappropriate, almost dangerous.

The Money Store is like Rotten, the notorious shock site whose slogan was "An archive of disturbing illustration", combined with eFukt, a site collecting material unsuitable for minors with weird content. The weird corner of the Internet, as they say, appreciates it and is grateful. The mainstream music world of the charts barely notices, as was to be expected.

The deal with Epic is already creaking. The second album is supposed to arrive in October 2012, under the title "No Love". The label wants to postpone it, perhaps because the creative process seems unstable and out of control. Naturally, Death Grips do things their own way and release the second album, with the title tweaked to No Love Deep Web, making it available online for free. The album is also shared on the filesharing service BitTorrent and racks up over 31 million track downloads… on the first day alone, as pointed out by Billboard. A few hours later the band's website is taken down, although Epic denies any involvement in the matter.

Either way, Death Grips once again find themselves without a label, free to roam the web with no censorship whatsoever. For the cover of No Love Deep Web they decide to go all out: Zach Hill's erect penis front and centre, with "No Love Deep Web" scrawled above it in marker. The image, which would sit perfectly well on the aforementioned eFuckt, is accompanied on their website by this caption: "US law states you must be 18 years of age to view graphic sexual material. We consider this art".

The meme machine goes into overdrive, and the parodies and reinterpretations are countless. The dick gets replaced, among other things, by bananas, feet, Pokémon, sandwiches and nuclear bombs. 

Violently noisy, No Love Deep Web (2012) has lost the effectiveness of The Money Store but retains its intent. The sound mix hasn't changed all that much, but the tracks work less well, with several passages that drag and a certain deterioration in the lyrics. The opener "Come Up And Get Me" alone deafens and stuns the listener without ever finding a chorus or a truly memorable moment.

There's no shortage, however, of songs that could have come straight from the previous masterpiece, or that expand on its language: the noise stammer and spectral melody of "Lil Boy", like Prodigy put through a shredder; the obsessive, claustrophobic "No Love", with its ferociously pounded drums; the frantic "World Of Dogs", assaulted by sub-bass and the repeated phrase "It's all suicide"; the industrial hip-hop nightmare of "Lock Your Doors"; the suffocating drones of "Deep Web". It works, though, as an addendum to what we'd already heard on The Money Store, without replicating its surprise and balance. The closing six minutes of "Artificial Death In The West", with cosmic synths evoking an alien or futuristic landscape, hint at a depletion of ideas and a possible shift in sound, but, stripped of the fury and the trademark mix of irony and ultra-violence, Death Grips seem considerably weakened.

Unsustainable hype: Government Plates, The Powers That B and the breakup

Born as a sensation on the web, Death Grips prove to be unstable and unpredictable. They use Bjork tracks for remixes, post plenty of material on YouTube, skip gigs or stage performances that mock their own audience. At Lollapalooza, one of the most famous American music festivals, they set up the stage with their instruments and project a letter from a would-be suicide, but never show up. They later claim that the set-up itself was the performance. They try to keep attention on themselves running high, but the web is merciless and keeps demanding ever greater provocations. Releasing new music is clearly a necessity, because if they waited a few years, the very audience that elevated them to icons of meme culture might disown them or simply ignore them.

A noise of shattering glass opens Government Plates (2013) along with the ultra-distorted "You Might Think He Loves You For Your Money But I Know What He Really Loves You For It's Your Brand New Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat", a punch straight to the face that overwhelms the listener and immediately makes them feel at home: Death Grips are back with their terrifying, unpredictable, unruly approach. It's a disorienting, incoherent third album, with tracks where sounds pile up, overlap and repeat as much as, or more than, the words do; the lyrics are by now reduced to screams, anti-slogans, obsessive bars. This is how "Anne Bonny" ends up being several songs in one, between vintage sci-fi synths, cacophonous explosions and percussion distorted almost beyond recognition.

It's a chaotic approach, adding video game sounds, lasers, techno beats ("This Is Violence Now (Don't Get Me Wrong)"), digital manipulations that sound like terrible hallucinations ("Birds"), repetitive, comically harmful-volume nursery rhymes ("Feels Like A Wheel"), deranged arpeggiators ("Big House"), cacophonous drones ("Government Plates") and an exhausting, endless finale with the deafening techno of "Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)".

It's hard to imagine anything more raucous, disordered, chaotic and raw than this: every track is a jumble of ideas thrown together with no regard for coherence and, of course, no regard whatsoever for the listener's eardrums. It's one of the ugliest-sounding albums one could possibly imagine, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. The ideas on The Money Store had the virtue of being channelled into tracks that were, all things considered, coherent, however eccentric and violent, whereas Government Plates presents them in a far more disordered and disorienting way.

After Epic, Warp takes a shot, signing the band and overseeing the development of the double album The Powers That B (2014-2015), split into two parts: Niggas On The Moon (2014) and Jenny Death (2015). The first part is the most confused and scattershot music of their career, a heap of ideas more tied than ever to electronic music, where rap is marginal and any sense of rhythm is frustrated by constant shifts. There are still provocations, for instance in the title and sample of “Have A Sad Cum BB”, but everything is dumped on the listener with no regard whatsoever. Keeping the hype alive is clearly essential for them, even by wrong-footing their audience's expectations, but on listen the tricks reveal themselves for what they are. Even the idea of sampling Bjork on every track is little more than an eccentric gimmick.

The second part is already a different matter. More energetic and frantic, as “I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States” makes clear right away, it still scatters its energy but nonetheless delivers a devastating assault of screamed rap-rock-metal and deafening, sickly electronics (“Inanimate Sensation”, “Turned Off”, “The Powers That B”, “Beyond Alice”). They perhaps linger too long torturing eardrums (“Why A Bitch Gotta Lie”) and occasionally lose their propulsive, creative drive, but they're still recognizable and frightening when they find some kind of balance, just enough to turn a spasm into a punch. They manage to ascend to the lyrical and the epic, through noise and distortion, with “Centuries Of Damn” and “On GP”: an unexpected flash of class from a trio of thugs.

In its final form, The Powers That B is outrageously bloated and sprawling, to the point of being a case study in the negative effects of the lowered costs of producing and marketing music in the streaming era. The big middle finger Death Grips flash at the music industry doesn't justify wasting listeners' time, who might well have benefited from the final 80-minute runtime being cut in half.

Around the same time, and completely out of the blue, they announce the band's breakup. They do so via a Facebook post and an image that reinforces their identity as a group born of web culture:

We are now at our best and so Death Grips is over. We have officially stopped. All currently scheduled live dates are canceled. Our upcoming double album The Powers That B will still be delivered worldwide later this year via Harvest/Third Worlds Records. Death Grips was and always has been a conceptual art exhibition anchored by sound and vision. Above and beyond a ‘band’. To our truest fans, please stay legend.

The release of the instrumental Fashion Week (2015) doesn't seem so out of place, a release that feels simply like a way to give fans whatever was left in the drawer. The compositions veer toward electronics with big beat intensity and techno frenzy, tinged with electro memories and industrial contamination. It's nothing that would draw much attention without the Death Grips name on the cover. The band presents it as a soundtrack, though obviously the accompanying video content is missing.

In 2016 they also release an EP, Interview 2016, which crystallizes yet another of their provocations. It's a collection of instrumentals that served as the sole content of a so-called video interview with Matthew Hoffman, which used this very music as its audio. It's a six-track set far more coherent and compact than Fashion Week, a tense blend of distorted, obsessive electro.

Hill and Morini even start another project. Death Grips, if not quite dead, seem at the very least on their deathbed.

Post mortem: Bottomless Pit e Year Of The Snitch

Death Grips' creative phase appears to have run dry when they resurface, as chaotically and unpredictably as ever. Their fifth album, Bottomless Pit (2016), recovers the intensity of their best days, if anything overdoing the violence to compensate for a certain shortage of genuinely new ideas. The thrash-metal-rap cannon blast “Giving Bad People Good Ideas” and the deafening stoner-metal-rap-rock of “Hot Head” are examples of a chaotic, deafening crossover that often refers explicitly to the aesthetic of the hardest, most aggressive rock, with a death-metal detour in “Ring A Bell”.

Strip away the armor, though, and the tracks aren't exactly unforgettable (“Eh”, “Trash”), and the solutions, however spectacular in their relentless string of explosions and deformations, are all in all familiar territory (“Bubbles Buried In This Jungle”, “Houdini”, “Three Bedrooms In A Good Neighborhood”). Worth appreciating are a few more deconstructed compositions like “BB Poison” or the unsettling “80808”, with its electronic ditties and demonic voices, as well as the exhilarating, deafening Boris-style rock'n'roll of “Bottomless Pit”.

It would be unfair to dismiss it as a mediocre album; Bottomless Pit is more a confirmation that holds no major surprises. Far more focused than The Powers That B, it plays through in one sitting without requiring much rethinking of one's idea of what Death Grips are and sound like. If they once marked out an unpredictable, peculiar hybrid of styles, these new tracks seem simply to broaden that territory a little, without upheaval.

If anything, the stakes are raised by the following EP Steroids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber Megamix) (2017), a single 22-and-a-half-minute track where Death Grips batter the listener's eardrums the way they did back in the days of Exmilitary, but with an array of solutions that are the fruit of years of accumulated experience. More than MC Ride, what marks an evolution from their earliest days is the production, now more crowded and shifting, with hammering yet highly creative rhythm work, far more varied electronic elements, and gabber intrusions that add an exhilarating intensity to the whole. Announced out of the blue on Facebook, this EP precedes by well over a year the sixth album Year Of The Snitch (2018), with which Death Grips symbolically return to the free, unpredictable format of their first mixtape. In some way they reinvent themselves, in a mood that's more playful and less furious, yet still abrasive and violent.

The galactic scratches of “Death Grips Is Online” take the rave ethos and plunge it into a cacophonous hell, while the hard'n'heavy references of “Bottomless Paint" explode into the distortion-saturated stoner-metal of “Black Paint”, like the Melvins joining forces with Kyuss. Yet these dark tracks are joined by an uncoordinated robotic dance like “Linda's In Custody”, with piano fragments, or the hilarious “The Horn Section”, a feverish instrumental that deserves a place among the most absurd music of the era. The grindcore of “Shitshow” sounds like one of early Napalm Death's spasms, but is unexpectedly swallowed by a galactic whirl of reverb, and it's almost as if Devo had taken up extreme metal, for the hilarious comic effect of its various elements piling on top of each other, not least the female voice stubbornly repeating the title.

They manage to surprise even those who know the whole discography when they build a funk-prog-rock track in “Dilemma”, a blend of blaxploitation and the poliziotteschi so dear to our own Calibro 35, or when they riff on Kraftwerk in “Little Richard” or on a mix of Pere Ubu and Flipper in the deafening, cabaret-like post-punk of “The Fear”.

They close the album exactly as one would expect from a band like them: in “Disappointed”, with a moronic chorus, they mock the very audience that criticizes their music, asserting their creative freedom.

In 2019 comes their roaringly loud swan song Gmail And The Restraining Orders, a furiously intense collage of over 28 minutes condensed into a single track. It's dominated by Zach Hill's drumming, launched at an unsustainable speed into a sea of voices and samples reverberated and warped to the point of total saturation of the listener's eardrums. It's hard to imagine anything noisier or more chaotic, so much so that one's mind returns once again to Black Flag, whom they sampled many years earlier: it's nearly half an hour of furious music, taking the most extremist spirit and adapting it to digital techniques. After just a few minutes the brain is so saturated that the effect becomes hallucinatory, a nauseating overstimulation of the senses. In a way it's as if Death Grips had gone out in a spectacular crash, and this is the expressionist depiction of that very catastrophic impact.

The further releases that followed are little more than curiosities. Even the live activity after these last releases doesn't change much about their career. On February 8, 2025, a message leaked online: it seems they have split up for good, but, Morin adds, no one can predict what will happen to the band. The news has not been confirmed by the band, as predictably unpredictable as ever.

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