Death Grips, from left: Zach Hill, Stefan Burnett, and Andy Morin

Death Grips: "Hacker" (via SoundCloud)

When I call Zach Hill, drummer for Sacramento's riotous, shit-starting Death Grips, he is resting his side from a recent band-practice injury. His voice is scratchy from "yelling into a tunnel all night" (I never get clarity on why). And he is applying a paint scraper to the screen of his laptop. Which recently caught fire. And was covered in spray paint. "It still works," he tells me happily. "I'm writing all the numbers back in with a Sharpie."

If I had tried to invent a more metaphorically tidy activity for Hill to be engaged in when I called, I would have failed. He's done his Tasmanian Devil thing behind the kit for innumerable highly-technical rock concerns -- Hella, Marnie Stern, El Grupo Nuevo De Omar Rodriguez-Lopez-- before Death Grips became his sole focus. The trio (Hill on drums, working in tandem with producer Andy Morin, and lead bellower Stefan Burnett) approach rap-rock-- a musical idea with a contentious history and dubious historical baggage-- and gleefully deface it, using an approach Hill refers to repeatedly as "future primitivism."

"There's a third-world aspect to the way we approach our music," Hill says. "We make it with whatever we have to make it with, usually iPhones, cameras-- we're not like, 'Oh, we don't have the right mic to do this.'" On major-label debut The Money Store, they collect dirty, twisted-up sounds from all kinds of unlikely places-- Youtube clips, real-life conversations-- and smash them together to create something compellingly depraved. It's hacked-up, corroded, and sick-- in every available definition of that word. I would not have been surprised to learn the album was mastered on Hill's flame-scarred, half-melted laptop.

"L.A. Reid compared our music to Whitney Houston,

right after her passing. I took it as a massive compliment."

Pitchfork: The Money Store is definitely an extreme experience-- it's hard to listen to it, shrug your shoulders, and say "meh."

Zach Hill: Thanks, we don't want to make anything that supports indifference. We always talk about the middle of the road, and how it's the worst place to be artistically.

Pitchfork: Which makes it kind of surprising coming from a major label-- what did Epic Chairman/CEO L.A. Reid say to you when you came into his office?

ZH: He didn't say a word, we just started playing music. He was air drumming the whole fucking time-- he was going hella hard. We had already met with a lot of people working up to that signing, and we went into that meeting hyper-skeptical as well. But the dude just connected with what we were doing. It was undeniable, and it's been totally undeniable since, too. He didn't mention anything as far as the abrasiveness. He was into it.

We had an amazing moment when we were finalizing the record. We had signed the contract, and he compared our music to Whitney Houston. We were tripping out; it was actually a heavy deal. He was talking about the emotional pull-- the feeling, not the literal sound-- the true fucking shit that you strike on. That was one of the most amazing things I'd ever heard. I took it as a massive compliment because the dude is on this primal level right there with us. He was able to go beyond these stigmas and attachments and he knew we wouldn't be threatened by something like that-- that we would know what he was talking about when he said that right after her passing. It was a really crazy experience.

Death Grips: "Lost Boys" (via SoundCloud)

Pitchfork: How do you view Death Grips compared to your other projects?

ZH: This group has been an exercise in whittling away all outside things and focusing my energies. This is it; I'm not doing anything else for the time being. I've been playing in the Boredoms for the last four years and they're one of my favorite bands in the world. But I'm even taking a hiatus from that. They understand. We recorded the first Hella record when I was like 20 years old, you know? I had just dropped out of high school and it was all exciting and great. I'm proud of those records, and I get a connection by physically performing it, but that's not the music I listen to. The music I'm making with Death Grips is way more along the lines of what I would listen to than anything I've ever made.

And Death Grips signifies a way for me to kill my own drum ego-- there are no physical drums on a lot of these songs, and some of them are just done with my fingers or hands. We kept saying, "How can we make this connect harder?" and my answer kept being, "I need to play simpler." That's a big change because I've been known as the "tech drummer guy" for over a decade. I'm proud of that, but I wanted to have my own band again.

Pitchfork: The mix on this record makes it sound like everything's collapsing in on itself constantly. How did you make some of these sounds?

ZH: Our processes are crazy. We'll set out to achieve a certain sound, but set it up to fail, and then rebuild the track out of that failure. For example, in the song "System Blower", there's this part that goes, "WA-WA-WA-WA-WA," and the drop is the sound of Venus Williams screaming when she hits a tennis ball. It was in a video we found on YouTube. The only things we sampled were things like that, things from everyday life. We all carry around camcorders; we'll record sounds with digital cameras and use those sounds on our records, with a real disregard for sound quality. We'll build something around something that's just fucked-- like, you just shouldn't use it. But there's a majestic quality to that rawness. When people talk about how our music is like rap music, but punk, I think they're talking about our use of instrumentation like that.

Pitchfork: Did any other batshit sounds make their way onto the record?

ZH: Yeah. The line "I've Seen Footage" was from a conversation I had with this street-person dude in Sacramento named Snake Eyes. A friend of ours recorded him on the porch in a conversation-- he didn't know he was being recorded. He was all fucked up on drugs and shit, just rattling off all this crazy information. He was talking about structures on the moon. I mean, I talk about those things, too. So we were talking about moon structures, and Snake Eyes says, "I've seen footage! I've seen footage of it!" And I was like, "That's good!"

These songs were conceptualized in all these weird, random ways. We approach music almost like musique concrète: We're sampling our day-to-day along with the filthiest things off of YouTube and trying to build powerful music out of all this stuff that's usually seen as trash.

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Pitchfork: This record also has a similar corroded, grimy feel to a lot of 1980s hip-hop: Hank Shocklee, the Bomb Squad, N.W.A-era Dr. Dre. Were those sounds in your mind at all?

ZH: Totally, but not in a nostalgic way. If the band is anti-anything, it's resting on some retro aesthetic. We live as futurists. But that music has totally inspired our energy level and our sound palette; those are straight-up classic sounds.

With that said, there's not a lot of talk about other music when we're making things. We all listen to a lot of modern rap and punk, but it doesn't happen like that in the creative process. The only song on this record we did sample-- and then decided not to use because we're on a major label now and getting clearance would've pushed back the release of the record-- was a Geto Boys song. But we weren't consciously trying to capture a certain era of rap music. If it's in there, it's natural.

And, honestly, I'm underwhelmed with rap music lately. There are a lot of things about it that just aren't that adventurous or exciting to me, whether it's musically, content-wise-- everything about it seems too comfortable. I sense danger every day of my life, all around me, on all these different levels, so if I'm not getting that feeling through the music, I just don't connect with it.

Death Grips: "Get Got"

Pitchfork: All those 80s rap records also share a real riot-music feel.

ZH: For sure. There was a challenge and extremity in that music, which was polarizing-- and that's a word that gets thrown around with Death Grips. If you feel unrest in your life, that kind of energy and sound makes you want to change whatever that problem is, and you're gonna fucking change it. We want our music to make people feel empowered, and that's where I could say it's like rap or punk. The ideology behind the genesis of those genres comes from a place of not being satisfied with an aspect of life and basically expressing that, and then the music creates an energy that's positive.

Photo by Jonny Magowan

Pitchfork: Lead vocalist Stefan Burnett declined to be interviewed for this piece and he seems like a reclusive guy, which is interesting considering his extroverted onstage behavior and the function he serves in the band.

ZH: He's just one of those people that's super private. Among friends, he's really lively and funny with tons of energy and charisma. And he's a really serious painter. When I first walked into his apartment, it was stacked floor-to-ceiling with painting and writing. He's been doing it for years.

But, as far as press and all of that goes, we're a new group. At some point, he definitely will start talking to people about this music that we're making. I think he really likes to have control over his life in a media world. He doesn't want to blow our whole thing out when it's just getting started.

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Pitchfork: Death Grips feel extremely mission-oriented. Do you have any mantras or animating principles as a group?

ZH: Yeah: "No Representation Is Better Than Misrepresentation." Another is the idea of acceleration-- that word seems to apply to every aspect of our band. I mean acceleration in a broad, universal sense, the way you feel the pace of everything moving forward so quickly. Things are becoming archaic at a faster rate than ever before, and there's this close-mindedness that can exist even within the creative realm, like accelerating towards these old notions of what's acceptable. One of the things we do when we're able to play bigger rooms is modify the field of space with visual effects, so you get the sense of acceleration from all corners of the room-- almost like how Star Tours does it.

Pitchfork: Is your music supposed to embody that acceleration, or is it a reaction to it?

ZH: It's more of an embracing of it. We'd like our music to make you feel like you are accelerating physically and mentally. I don't mean that in an alienating sense, like we're some political band pushing our agendas on people. We're not. That's why I use more ambiguous words like "energy" and "feeling."

We're real hesitant, because we want to keep things on a day-to-day level where we can talk about being out of your mind on drugs and all those other, less-heady things that are totally real to our lives and just as relevant as the more abstract aspects. So it's weird to be like, "Our band is like the internet!" But actually it kind of is: You have all the lowest-level activity side-by-side with the highest intellect also happening within the same realm.

Pitchfork: That's easily the most fascinating thing about the internet to me-- you're the same two seconds away from watching TED lectures or some porn.

ZH: Totally. And people are doing both those things at once. We want our music to work the same way: all at once.