Rap trio clipping. take pride in their commitment to ego death. When they formed they adopted two foundational rules—strict avoidance of first-person perspectives and the word nigga—just to make explicit that their music is not about them. Using found sounds, foley tricks, and imagined characters, rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes fabricated entire worlds. Following the space opera of 2016’s Splendor & Misery, which was actually nominated for a Hugo Award following a fan campaign, and the abstract improvisation of 2018’s Face EP, they channel horrorcore.

Their third album is named after a lyric from the soundtrack of ’70s horror film Ganja & Hess, a surreal love story in which a vampiric black couple wrestles with their appetite for blood. The movie is lurid, mysterious, and tender, a combination that completely eludes clipping. Somehow, despite the gory source material, There Existed an Addiction to Blood is their most bloodless project to date.

Their vision of horror is high-octane, high-concept, and fussy. Technically, there is a lot happening in their meticulous, densely referential songs. Across There Existed an Addiction to Blood there are shootouts, a ScHoolboy Q interpolation (Diggs uses Q’s flow from “What They Want” on “Nothing is Safe”)and a resurrected Bobby Hutton on “Blood of the Fang”—but every detail feels exhaustingly mechanical.

As a vocalist, Diggs has the charisma of a metronome and the expressive range of a sock puppet. Performing in a stiff monotone, he exclusively raps fast or faster, enunciating words with crisp diction but never relishing them or giving them life. “And there may even be some meaning gleaming in the streets that they built/On top of dead bodies in the olden days when the pen was a quill,” he raps on “Intro.” “The best menage is a death menage, agree?/ Chest massage with electric rods for three,” he says on “The Show.” You can appreciate the internal rhymes and inversions, but his flow is so robotic it rarely feels like he appreciates them

Snipes and Hutson are just as perfunctory. Their production style is informed by film scores and a range of genres, but their beats are dry and lifeless. “He Dead” is a dirge that dissolves into bland ambience. “Club Down,” presumably an ode to shut-the-party-down Memphis crunk, is built around an arid, prickly drone that wanes in and out of focus. Drumless and peppered with EFX, the beat is as vast and empty as an airlocked bunker. The sole outlier is “Blood of the Fang,” which works elements from Ganja & Hess into a throbbing romp that Diggs navigates nimbly. It's one of the rare moments where his flows feel loose and natural.

In theory, the pulp and theater of horrorcore should fit clipping.'s skill set. Snipes has done extensive work as a composer for TV and film; Hutson has a background in experimental music, and Diggs is an actor and slam poet. Attention to atmosphere and cadence is essential to all their disciplines, and horrorcore has often drawn from the TV and movie horror canon. What sinks the record is its enduring sense of cosplay. Horrorcore is about terror as a mood and as a state of mind. When RZA mocks suicide, Tyler defiles corpses, or Lord Infamous summons demons, there’s a sense of alienation behind the provocation. The point of horrorcore is to both piss off church moms and find a language and vehicle for rage and misery. But there is no aching, tortured self at the center of clipping., just three fanboys’ overworked hearts palpitating into the abyss. While you can’t deny the imagination, you also can’t fathom the point.

Buy: Rough Trade

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