On the 22nd of May 2017, experimental hip hop group Death Grips released Steroids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber Megamix), a surprise 22 minute long “song”, consisting of about 7 individual songs that flowed into each other. Initially, I wasn’t blown away by the release, though sonically it was amazing, the lyrics weren’t put out with it (unusual for DG) and making out what Ride was saying was a bit of a task and until I did so, I never really appreciated it. By the end of the year however, Steroids was my second favourite thing they’d ever put out, with different parts of the song gripping me each time it seemed like I’d move onto something else. It’s like Ride’s entire ethos’ is condensed into long piece, the insane hook on that song of “Come and go whenever do whatever you please, personalized like genetics to supply all your needs, don’t be frightened by skeptics, listen essentially, you’re sleeping on a goldmine” bragging about his lyricism that could genuinely mean anything, preaching that he’d “rather not get involved” on the final track, the lines “your innocence save your hopes, I just throw the dice” summarizing how Ride just does things and takes risks without regard for the outcomes and how that relates to how he “pursues this life with no friends”, truly being out for himself and only himself. It also deals somewhat with the confusion towards his sense of self, that like all these other themes, has shown up on other Death Grips releases before – “I’ve got countless current identities, which one should I pretend to be, which one will be the end of me, fuck my perfect coordinates”. These are just some of the reasons, relatable or otherwise just sick lyrics, that Steroids became one of my favourite releases of theirs, Zach’s impeccable drumming performance across this album being another one of course. So this year, after a couple of mostly underwhelming singles and not really feeling the album, I was hopeful the same thing would happen to their 2018 album, Year of the Snitch.

I wrote the introduction to this about a month before beginning to write the rest of it, at a time when I still wasn’t really feeling YotS and expected this to go in the vein of ‘it’s a really good album, but disappointing by the standards of Death Grips’, and saying how different an experience it was to Steroids in that capacity. It feels necessary to preserve that introduction, even though I’ve now entirely come around on Year of the Snitch, even if not to the same extent as I did with Steroids. This album seems like an expansion on the themes of internet culture and media usage that we’ve seen before in Death Grips music, whether it was briefly on the song ‘Culture Shock’, the “Death Grips is Online” retweeting, the ARG they put on the deep web to promote No Love Deep Web or even some of the theories about ‘Houdini’ commenting on Tinder, but it takes all these ideas a bit further and there’s at least some cohesion between the tracks.

The most obvious starting point for this theme is the song ‘Death Grips is Online’, which may be the most explicit stating of any theme within DG’s discography. When Ride raps “I don’t have enough power, I’m staring right at her”, this could be some guy totally connected to the internet not having ‘power’ (with a double meaning of being plugged in enough) to approach a girl he’s interested in, which although feels tenuous now, ties in later into the themes expressed on ‘Little Richard’ and ‘The Fear’. This can be seen as the beginning of someone’s journey into the ‘Manosphere’ spaces online, toxic male communities like The Red Pill or the different forms the Incel community has taken over the years, although power has the electrical charge element, it can also be seen as actual physical power in this context. The intro to Linda’s in Custody could be the beginning of someone’s introduction, or indoctrination, into these spaces – “trust me, trust us, you know us well, we purge herds of stunted cells, we nurse the worm until it swells”. Hahaha features references to gaming in Sonic and possibly Mario, “the princess”, and there’s definitely an imitation of gaming culture in the lyric “tryna dick your mom and shit”. Ride really seems to be playing the role of immature gamers, with their disgusting attitudes toward women on full display throughout this song

Theories on r/deathgrips have discussed ‘Little Richard’ as being aimed at Richard Spencer, the poster boy for the alt right, or it being about a school shooter, but there’s definitely themes about the Red Pill brand of masculinity running through the song, as Richard “got meaner, he got bigger”, how he’s gonna “bomb and look good when he bombs, in the dorms” or that he “just needs the world to be what he has seen”. All of this points toward him having spent too much time in these online communities, totally removed from any reality and submerged in their ideologies, but to bring the school shooter interpretation into it, the line “in the horn section, they hid weapons” can then point to the toxic repercussions of these online spaces, having seen people like Elliott Rodger not just produced from them, but then idolised within some of the communities. The Fear can be seen more so as tackling online dependency, and it could be describing the coldness of the media you’re interacting with, the second verse detailing this addiction, “pulled close by it’s pliers, cold, sharp, and expired”, and the repercussions, “lost tongue, mystery, everyone’s on to me – the fear”. I will definitely say that the “missing entire weeks, months gone as I peak” is shockingly relatable in terms of my own history with Football Manager in this capacity, it could almost be describing the ‘hedonic depression’ Mark Fisher described seeing in his classroom, where his students could only seek instantaneous forms of pleasure. The “lost tongue” could harken back towards ‘Culture Shock’, where Ride raps “your free will has been taken, yeah, you’re the media’s creation and you don’t know” – the idea that any personal expression is now stolen or impossible because of an overreliance on outside sources. The ‘Culture Shock’ lyric itself came across as a bit on an unnuanced, old grandpa hating on new things, kinda idea but bringing the idea into this context fleshes both ideas out a bit further.

The “vampire” on The Fear could even function as the ‘Bourgeoise Left’ Fisher also wrote about in his article “Exiting the Vampire Castle”, and then the second verse could then be describing the overreaction of online spaces to social miscues and non-PC behaviours, where people end out carrying the baggage of an offensive tweet around with them forever, though I’m not certain this is the space for such an analysis. Galen Pehrson’s short animated film ‘The Caged Pillows’ (which both Trash and On GP are featured in) is an analysis of television and online cultures. While not strictly speaking a DG work, it doesn’t feel entirely out of place to discuss the work of someone they have a close working relationship with, with Galen featuring in the music video for ‘Shitshow’ and DG making a song specifically for his video ‘True Vulture’.

This is definitely not a water tight analysis, entire songs (Streaky, Flies) are disregarded and there might be a point to be made that the function of technology and these forms of media under Capitalism results in the behaviours depicted on the album, which would make it thematically similar to The Powers That B though there isn’t any explicit references to Capital really. Outro could’ve been placed as the second to last song to finish the album thematically, but this might be where ‘Disappointed’ fits in– the “stalk less, talk less, show less” could be directed at using too much time on the internet, and at least the start particularly aimed at fandoms, and probably their own. On the same verse, the “no jobs, fuck jobs, not hired” and “skin tight, too tight” could possibly be talking about the kind of pressure and suffocating people feel under a capitalist system, but this definitely feels like a reach. The two Rides’ rapping at you, almost overwhelmingly, could be seen as representing information and how we’re constantly swarmed between different media and our attention is just sapped, again bringing back the ideas from ‘Culture Shock’. There’s still allusions to death (as always), on Flies and The Fear that are overlooked here and I haven’t even touched the references to Charles Manson all over the album, the title of Linda’s in Custody being the most obvious.

Analysis is always one of the most interesting parts of a Death Grips album, the lyrics are ambiguous and meaning is often hidden, though Ride definitely seems to be from the Roland Barthes/Post-Structuralist school of thought in that the meaning of the work is entirely up to you, the reader/listener. Unfortunately, compared to their other albums, Year of the Snitch is underwhelming without analysis. Most of the other albums are just enjoyable in of themselves, and even though this is new territory for Death Grips, the sound itself doesn’t feel very fresh. There’s a found-film vibe to the sound, or cursed image, that I guess helps the themes that run throughout but for me it’s the weakest album they’ve put out solely in terms of sound. I’m not only underqualified to discuss the musical aspects of the album in a serious capacity, but I’m uninterested for once. The first four tracks are really great, Black Paint has this old, stoner metal feel to it and it’s definitely one of the best tracks on the album, Ride’s chanting on the hook is brilliant and it feels like something you’d hear in a stadium. The breakdown in Flies is sick, but the rest of the track is pretty boring. Linda’s in Custody is absolutely nuts. Hahaha and Dilemma both have similar feels, though maybe more of an indie rock kinda thing and with the creepy vibes that run throughout the album, but they’re not really anything special. Streaky is catchy as hell, a lot of the time it’s a great listen but sometimes the fact that it’s just one loop makes it quite underwhelming. Shitshow is a really fast paced minute long punk song, I guess it’s okay – really the run from The Horn Section to Little Richard is just okay sonically.