Whenever Death Grips get accused of bad intentions, they’re usually guilty of bad judgment. It’s easy to understand why people get offended by their dick moves, both literal and figurative. But for anyone invested in the group as an artistic entity, all of this retro and regressive Punk 101 chicanery serves as a distraction or a depletion from music that derives a purer shock value by sounding like it has no real precedent. If nothing else, their fourth album Government Plates is a reminder that, right, Death Grips make music! And it drops without any narrative context or controversy about its packaging, its label situation, or their disappearance from social media—like your parents, Death Grips have a Facebook page and unlike NO LOVE DEEP WEB or Sky Ferreira’s album, Government Plates boasts a cover that won’t get you temporarily booted off the site. With a lack of external talking points and most of indie rock's ire currently being directed elsewhere, Government Plates loudly reestablishes Death Grips as a group freed by having no ideals whatsoever, making music without a past about a present with no future.

And here’s the squalid moment in which Death Grips find themselves: a bottle breaks, an air raid siren serves as MC Ride’s alarm clock, and he defaces his scrambled, arrhythmic rapping with batshit shrieking. Is it meant to suggest that he’s waking up from a bad dream? Or is he just being tasered mid-verse? As you might expect, Government Plates spends about half its time expressing its paranoia and the other half justifying it; enforcers are shadowy and lurking, their use of power always theoretical and impending, spelled out in the titles for people who have no interest in engaging with the thrilling music herein. But are we to cut through the battered radio soundclash of “Bootleg (Don't Need Your Help)” and the mesmerizing drones of seven-minute closer “Whatever I Want (Fuck Who’s Watching)” with Occam’s Razor and assume it’s all directed at Epic or concert promoters?

You could do that, though Government Plates functions as a Rorschach and not just because many of these songs are ugly, amorphous inky splatter. Throughout, Ride smears words and multiple meanings unwittingly tease themselves out—darting over and through Zach Hill’s drums like they're a tire maze, Ride mutters “L.A. creeping under my skin,” or possibly “scales.” This is from “Big House”, so is the title an understood synonym for prison or a reference to how Death Grips blew Epic’s money by living at the Chateau Marmont? During “Birds”, is Ride saying “I got higher, I got fake”? Or is it, “I got hired, I got fake?” “I got hired, I got paid”? Is it a critique of drugs, of corporate influence or a boast about how Death Grips have made a career largely out making people who give them money look stupid?

It’s easy to assume something this purposefully noided is Death Grips crafting a response, that they’ve been cornered by the music industry, expectations of fans, something on the outside. But to conclude that Death Grips are reacting to anything strips them of their unique power. You will learn nothing about how they feel about, say, about Obamacare, the NSA or Yeezus, a record that may have not been directly influenced by Death Grips but was likely aware of their existence. Death Grips may have endured a tough year, but they brought almost all of it upon themselves, and Government Plates is a pointedly proactive record that seeks out its own stimuli; and that’s why their pranks are nowhere near as interesting as their self-inflicted stunts. As with Bikram yoga or a hunger strike, artificially heightened circumstances help them realize internal purity.

So Government Plates isn’t defined by dissonance, volume, or abrasion so much as discomfort, Death Grips trying to figure out how to advance a sound that won’t stay still. “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” is a good place to start. That’s an unwieldy title that at least has room to say everything it needs to. The song itself cramps what could otherwise be a wubbed-out dubstep appropriation into a gawky 6/8 meter. Ride discovers a staggered cadence that works between corroded pinwheel synths and drums that evoke the crunch of a stomped cockroach during “Anne Bonny”. Then the beat switches just to see if he’s willing to contort himself into its spaces (he accepts).

You can certainly project anger onto Death Grips, it’s tough to imagine happy people making this kind of music. But hey, might as well party at ground zero. Death Grips can actually be fun, or at least promise a payoff to all this stress. In that way, it recalls The Money Store, which in retrospect was the kind of album a major label would’ve been very pleased with after signing Death Grips, i.e., one with actual bars-and-hooks songs. Government Plates is also filled with hooks, if you remember that the word is also a synonym for a boxer connecting flush with your face. MC Ride is every bit as percussive as Zach Hill, and Zach Hill’s drums can prove to be a mouthpiece that’s more fluent and expressive than its human counterpart. “Two Heavens” and “Im Overflow” in particular are hip-hop as survivalist minimalism, merging little more than vocal texture and percussion into chest-puffing B-boy boasts.

And hell, Death Grips can be kinda funny, too. You can’t be this premeditated with knowing what people think about you and if it wasn’t clear that a) there is a joke and b) Death Grips is in on it, there’s a song called “This is Violence Now (Dont get me wrong)”. Remember when MC Ride namedropped Magical Mystery Tour curiosity “Blue Jay Way” and Santana’s Abraxas on The Money Store*?* If not, the first song on Government Plates is a Bob Dylan reference. If a Dadaist Death Grips nursery rhyme sounds hilarious in concept, that’s because “Birds” is pretty much just that. Ride sneers “I cop this attitude at all times,” in a posh, flippant accent, the kind attributable to someone vapid enough to say “I cop this attitude.”

An awkward one-off upon its original release, “Birds” serves as a pivot for Government Plates, the point where “new Death Grips” starts to become Death Grips doing something legitimately new. Some parts of Government Platesare actually pretty and not in that perverse, S&M way. And during the second half, they get awfully close to proper dance music, or at least its rigorous structure and of course, this formalism makes for even more interesting tension. “Feels like a wheel” is Death Grips’ take on HI-NRG drum and bass, which is to say, it focuses less on emotional ecstasy than the artificial components and side effects of the club drug, the toxic chemicals and fried nerve endings. The only intelligible lyric is “let me live my life,” which turns the title into a double entendre, it could mean “rolling” or just being stuck. “Im overflow” about sums up how Death Grips react to stability and yet it hinges on Ride’s most straightforward battle rapping, punctuated with a yell of “hot shit!’

Government Plates isn’t here to teach you a lesson. When Death Grips are overt about what they think, they often come off like bratty teenagers, acting out against people who want to help them. Unlike the blunt, confrontational NO LOVE DEEP WEB, Government Plates lets you think for yourself and even if it doesn’t have an agenda, that doesn’t mean it’s nihilistic. It’s music that doesn’t care about how you feel, just how you react to it. All the same, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum and when Death Grips interact with the public, they can produce something elemental, in a literal sense where the periodic table can take violent turns: oxidation, sulfur fumes, nitrous, horrible fluorescents and neon, fossil fuel. Or, maybe a hydrogen bomb, with all of its attendant amorality: Death Grips provide the power, you provide the politics.