Death Grips is over. It’s everything but official. We are not getting another album, and probably not getting another tour either.
The world that Death Grips performed in simply does not exist anymore. This may be hard for some to accept, but when one steps back and looks at the entire project objectively, it is quite clear that things have reached their logical conclusion.
Before discussing the unofficial curtain call of one of the 2010s most notorious bands, we must also mention the limelight of Death Grips and how this success bled into the greater Internet as a whole, spawning what may be the (mostly undeserved) worst fanbase of a music group of all time.
When Death Grips began to pick up momentum, the world was in its awkward phase between real life and the Internet. During the era of 2011–2014, smartphones began to permeate through society to near totality in just a few years time, and their relationship to the Internet was less symbiotic than people think. Smartphones and their proximity to social media, instead of merging with the existing Internet like it is commonly believed, became a firmament that separately exists above the web and serves almost as an inversion of the culture of the web under it.
The “new web” flipped the values of the Internet upside-down, creating a new order of low-investment and low-anonymity browsing and posting that ran countercurrent to the previously established rules of the web, where important things were squirreled away into niche places that required digging, and where it was more common than not to use a pseudonym that protected one’s identity — and to a greater extent, removed the sense of self from one’s passage on the Internet, for better or for worse.
In 2010, Death Grips debuted in the rapidly fossilizing parts of the Internet that cared about things. Some of the earliest records of the band are now-deleted or lost interviews from passionate fans and small-time music blogs, a stark contrast with the band’s complete radio silence during their prime while fans clamored for any detail, no matter how slight. This brief period before their explosion into underground popularity was likely the ideal level of fame the band wanted, enough success to keep the lights on, get booked, and be completely free to make what they want.
As the world changed and information began to move exponentially faster, Death Grips actually used this divide to their advantage. They still stayed away from taking up a social media platform like most bands were beginning to do, but instead sought out catching the eyes and ears of the most grizzled Internet divers, people who had already been digitally digging to find things hidden in obscurity.
Death Grips, likely at least proficient in navigating the Internet due to their prowess with this kind of thing before 4chan became a household name, realized that places like /mu/ and other music-focused places that required digital digging to reach would be an easy way to get people to listen to their project without having to sell out. It wasn’t necessarily for promotion that they gravitated to these places, but moreso because these places existed on the fringe of both the Internet and larger music discussion, and would probably at least be receptive to Death Grips.
And they were correct about this. A cult following was almost immediate once they dropped their debut, Exmilitary, and was set in stone after The Money Store. This fervor for the band would be very helpful in their earlier stages, but would become a thorn in their sides in the long run. While the support of die-hard fans was always going to be useful for ensuring ticket and merch sales, thus allowing for the comfortable continuation of the project and other artistic endeavors, the fans would eventually become something that Death Grips was indifferent to at best, and diametrically opposed to at worst.
The primary issue with the Death Grips fandom was and always has been insincerity and desire to fit in. The memification of the band was something that occurred totally outside of their control, and incredibly, the fans managed to nosedive the reputation of the band despite its members almost never speaking aloud.
This memification ultimately ruined the ability to address the band in a neutral way, dragging them down from the same lofty standards that other “/mu/-core” music groups are held to, such as Xiu Xiu, Slint, Coil, or sweethearts of the board. There was no real way to discuss any artistic output from the group meaningfully without someone coming in to shit it up with funny pictures they found online.
Most of this can be attributed to the first few years that deeper Internet culture and surface level usage began to overlap. Music discussion in general is a really good example of how bad it can truly get. No one who has ever browsed /mu/ with any frequency would tell you it’s a good place to discuss music, but it bleeding out into the greater Internet was a net negative because of the fact that essentially only the worst parts of music discussion there made their way out.
And it makes sense. It’s a lot easier to export a bunch of memes about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea than it is to try to broach bands that may be challenging to listen to the uninitiated. This lowest-common-denominator style of posting was a natural byproduct of the way the Internet was changing, but it helped perpetuate a new culture that made music objectively worse — think of the prominence of Anthony Fantano, Reddit music discussion, topsters, etc.
Ultimately, there would be no better flagship band to demonstrate this shittification of music discussion than Death Grips, through no fault of their own. It wasn’t enough to just enjoy the music, it had to be dissected into funny pictures or memes in order to show how noided someone was. Fans couldn’t just enjoy the music like any other band, they had to enter an obsessive level of fandom, because for most of them this was the first experimental project they had ever listened to.
A problem that quickly became apparent is that when, instead of discovering music organically through digging around your other favorites, you see a meme and want to be a part of the fun, there is no actual investment or respect for the band or its ethos beyond the surface level, nor is there the gradual increase in obscurity that usually comes as a result of starting somewhere relatively accessible in music taste and slowly working your way into the more unusual and bizarre.
Because of this, Death Grips, whose music is really not experimental in any way, suddenly became the weirdest thing that most new listeners had ever tried. Liking Death Grips became either a badge of pride that had to be expressed to anyone who could be shocked, or a shameful indulgence that had to be kept secret from strangers who may recognize the band for fear of opening dialogue.
This process managed to actually turn new people off to the band preemptively, because the only thing outsiders knew about the band was that its fans were freaks who should be avoided. And they weren’t wrong, necessarily. It seems like Death Grips fans, while idolizing a band who has essentially disavowed irony and its byproducts, have managed to exclusively lock themselves into an ironic (or meta-ironic) appreciation of the band in a way that also requires the world to be aware at all times of how noided they are as individuals.
In the long run, Death Grips is a band who was poisoned by their success. There are few other bands who have such a juxtaposition between the creators’ dead serious commitment to art and the irony-poisoned, misbegotten dregs of their fandom. Even if you look at all of the adjacent projects of the band members, such as Hella or The I.L.Y.s, there is nothing even close to the level of fandom that Death Grips has incurred, and as a result the bands are actually able to stand on their own work musically without the baggage.
This is one of the primary reasons that I don’t think Death Grips will ever come back. Anyone who attended the 2023 North America tour can inform you that the fans have not mellowed out with time. If anything, they are much worse than before.
Concerts in general have been in a bad state after the pandemic, respect for performers and art have fallen to critically low levels across the board, but for a band whose every tour could be their last, you would think there would be some degree of even just self-preservation from fans. After not releasing an album since 2018 and already having broken up once, what was likely supposed to be a victory lap before quietly fading into the night was instead made into a prominent example of why Ride, Andy, and Zach are loathe to ever step foot onto the stage under Death Grips again.
Aside from the fandom and their consequences on the band, there is also the question of time and place for Death Grips. Even if they wanted to keep making music, is there still a place for them?
When Death Grips debuted in 2010, the world was a completely different place. The Internet has accelerated the natural evolution of culture to a breakneck pace. What is transgressive one year is passé the next year. Cycles happen in seasons, months, in our collective desire to devour the next thing to stimulate us as fast as possible. The instantaneous exchange of information has gradually whittled our attention spans down to nothing, and the lifespan of art has suffered as a result of this — Death Grips actually float something similar in “Trash”.
But ultimately, for a band who set out to make a “Future-primitive” sound, where is there left to go?
What seems clear to me, is that Death Grips ultimately were more effective than they ever could’ve thought possible in exploring this idea.
They uncovered the (at the time) hidden, dark side of the digital age, and how utilizing something you can’t fully know like the Internet can be destructive in ways you can never imagine — in their case, the ball and chain of their fans’ behavior: not only the duality of loving the band with the near complete ability to ignore the value of art, but also the newer phenomenon of being a private person and having digital sleuths following your every move with more detail than military intelligence. As incredibly private, sometimes paranoid people, they probably still have to look over their shoulders every time they go out in public.
In any future-facing work of art, there is an element of acceptance for the unknown. Death Grips knew that things would not necessarily get better, but they knew they couldn’t predict the ways that it would happen. And in this, in the same way that 1984 is not a literal fortune-telling of the future, but more of a descriptor of its predicted attitudes and conditions, Death Grips were right about a lot of things. We are living in the images they described ten years ago on the precipice of the digital age. And now that we’re living in a tech dystopia, can more even be said?
My opinion is that the project has completed its purpose. Death Grips have made future-primitive music. They have accurately addressed the darkness that was looming just out of view while the world rapidly attached itself to Wi-Fi and put dopamine-printing supercomputers in everyone’s pocket. They stayed true to themselves and only made what they wanted to make for almost a decade.
And now, in the moment that we live in today, I do not see a reason that Death Grips would need to make another album according to the ethos and themes that formed the project. Everything they needed to say has been said, and now we are living in a world they warned us about.
The final reason that I think the project has concluded is based on the musical landscape’s changes in the past decade, in some parts due to the influence of Death Grips.
Death Grips is a band that, while not really “experimental”, is difficult for the average person who appreciates music on a surface level to parse. The effects of the project, for most people, are actually heard much more commonly through the artists that they inspired.
The influences of punk, industrial, metal, and electronic in Death Grips’ music have trickled down into a lot of today’s music. The unrelenting aggression, both in the production and vocals of Death Grips, are now much more common today and have even coalesced into a sort of “rage” sound, which we see is quite popular in the underground even now.
Most would argue that the first real clear-cut example of this influence would be Yeezus. No matter how much Kanye or his team would deny it, it is unmistakable that Death Grips influenced the sound of what would become a cultural touchstone album, a dividing line that separated before and after from an artist who, until then, had played it relatively safe in making innovative, but still very accessible music. Yeezus was a complete departure from Kanye’s historic sound, and polarized listeners almost completely.
The reaction to the album when it dropped was absolutely insane. No one knew what to think about this wild card of an album, most had no frame of reference to even compare it to. There were no neutral listeners, people fucking loved it or considered it one of the greatest let downs of all time. However, this step into uncharted territory would be further inspiring to many more who found the loud, abrasive sounds of Yeezus appealing, after a decade we now see that not only was Yeezus a classic, but it helped inspire an entire generation to push boundaries in production and sound.
Over the years, some of the other acts that Death Grips would be cited as an influence for were Tyler, the Creator, David Bowie, XXXTentacion, Kero Kero Bonito, JPEGMafia, Björk, and many more. These musicians all represent a huge spread of location, age, and genre. Even now, we see the descendants of this style in new era pioneers like Playboi Carti, Rico Nasty, Machine Girl, and other artists whose sound has shared borders with Death Grips. Their influence, while smaller now as time moves on, continues to shape the sound of a new generation.
In this sense, they did help create the “sound of the future”. But now, because of the trendiness of aggressive, coarse sound, is there still a way to innovate? While I do think the individual members will continue to work on their side projects and artistic endeavors, I think the Death Grips project is done.
Death Grips is uninterested in beating a dead horse. In a now-deleted interview with Pitchfork, Ride actually says “We’re not into lateral movement”, which is clear by the massive variation in sound in their discography over the last decade. I don’t anticipate them making any more music in today’s musical landscape. Ironically enough, Death Grips themselves gave a sort of similar send-off when they broke up in 2014.
When a project is done, it’s done. Now that Death Grips is over, the artists behind it will inevitably move onto the next thing. And I, amongst many others, will be eager to see it.
