March 2025 AOTM

clipping. - Dead Channel Sky

Tracks 20

Runtime 53mins

Favorite Tracks Dominator, Malleus, Mirrorshades pt. 2, Welcome Home Warrior

I recently learned that industrial hip-hop trio clipping, one of my favorite groups of all time, is not nearly as well known as I thought, so allow me to set the scene. Clipping is Jonathan Snipes, a film score composer, William Hutson, a noise music artist, and Daveed Diggs, one of the most talented rappers I have ever heard, who is well known for his time on the original cast of Hamilton as the Marquis de Lafayette. To say what you are likely thinking right now, this is an insane collection of people. Looking at the scope of clipping’s projects alone it seems even crazier. Laser-focused concept albums with vivid storytelling ranging in genre from slasher movie horror all the way to spacefaring sci-fi, all made with some of the most unique noise and electronic sound design I have ever heard, full stop. But so far they have stuck the landing every single time, dropping album after album of straight bangers that get even better when you re-listen to them and piece together the story. 

For this album, the theme is Cyberpunk. Clipping takes us through a technological hellscape, painting a gritty world of cameras, drones, holograms, and hackers that always seems just a little too close to our own. Diggs’ lyrics are as impressive as always, using references to things like William Gibson’s Neuromancer and The Conscience of a Hacker to build multi layered vignettes at speeds and rhythms and densities that realistically should make them entirely incoherent. But they unfold like a cybernetic puzzle box. This is an album you can dive into again and again and discover more of the story every time, an album that makes you want to sit down and pick apart every lyric. 

Snipes and Hutson hold nothing back on completing the grimy cyberpunk concept. Pulling influences from classic techno, hardstyle, cybergrind, and digital hardcore, the soundscape on each track is so rich, ripe with samples and bursts of noise. On the interludes the gloves fully come off and Snipes and Hutson step outside the beat, like rogue ai, a reminder that the glue holding this digital world together could fall to chaos at any moment, echoing the hum and whine of the machines they hide in. One of my favorites is Malleus, an interlude that features Wilco guitarist Nels Cline (I still can’t get over how out of left field a Nels Cline feature on an industrial hip hop album is it’s so funny to me). His guitar playing somehow both produces sounds I’ve never heard from a guitar and also never stops sounding like a guitar, mixed beautifully by Snipes and Hutson with a beat compressed so that it sounds like it’s bleeding through someone else’s earbuds. 

Clipping puts so much love and care and depth in every piece of this album. It’s so so good please do not skip this record. 

If you like this record, also check out my other favorite clipping records: CLPPNG, There Existed An Addiction To Blood, Visions Of Bodies Being Burned

Other new albums I really enjoyed this month:

faradayribcage - 03JERSEYDEVIL

Dutch Interior - Moneyball

Palmyra - Restless

Men I Trust - Equus Asinus

BAMBARA - Birthmarks

Circuit des Yeux - Halo On The Inside