Clipping are masters of 2020 horror in new LP

Clipping’s new album Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020) has one hell of a story to tell you. Released on the 23rd of October, the album serves as a sequel to last year’s LP There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019) as a noise rap nightmare fuel in the best way possible. Rapper Daveed Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes create their own lore, weaving together horror film tropes and current and past events, building a tapestry of terror which reflects the innate fears of living in modern America. 

The album begins with an intro track that sets a chilling scene, with throbbing drums that increase with intensity as the dark ambiance builds in Tell-Tale Heart fashion. Diggs’ flow increases in pace as the track progresses until the static noise in the background overwhelms everything else–headphone users beware. As auteurs of their genre, they end the intro by saying “It’s clipping,” marking this sound as distinctively theirs.   

The next track that follows, “Say the Name,” is a standout in the album. With an incredibly catchy hook of “candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned,” this track references films such as Candyman and Rosemary’s Baby. More notably, this track ties the horror film imagery to the genocidal history of America, especially against Black communities. Diggs mentions both the Great Migration and the War on Drugs, in lyrics such as “Lobotomies like pills, get ’em for cheap / The party line, ‘Crack kills,’ they trying to see.” The song concludes with an instrumental ending that is cacophonous and swelling, building off of the hook into utter chaos. 

The album uses several interludes, including “Wytchboard,” which is a thirty second clip of two girls playing with a Ouijia board, as well as Drove, which is almost a minute long recording of sheep in a field at night. The most interesting interlude is “Invocation.” This track, which features Greg Stuart, uses a tone with a frequency of 666.0 Hz, confirmed by Clipping on their Instagram story earlier this week. All three interludes are cryptic and eerie, uniting the various stories woven together on the album. 

Visions of Bodies Being Burned is distinctly radical in its politics. In “Something Underneath,” Diggs’ impeccable flow details a story of a zombie apocalypse which sounds uncannily similar to a communist uprising. He raps “Broken middle finger pointed right up to the sky / Broken fist and hammer hangin’ right up in the light / Waiting patient for the signal when the time is right / To bring it down.” The song “Make Them Dead” has anticolonial themes and serves as the antithesis to the very characters Diggs originated in the musical Hamilton. “Body for the Pile” calls cops “three little piggies” and paints the stories of the deaths of three individual cops. 

“Pain Everyday,” featuring Michael Esposito, is another standout piece, as its lyricism describes the way lynchings are often passed off as suicide, and poetically incites the ghosts of these victims to haunt their colonizing counterparts. The electronic compositions in the background are intensely layered with a drum n’ bass feel, and the syncopated percussion complements the haunting violin melody that plays over it. 

The second-to-last track, “Enlacing,” serves as a powerful conclusion to the album. The song is dissociative in both message and sound. Lyrics like “Pick up the pieces / Pick up the cues like a human / See what you needed? / Fuck are you doing?” leave the listener feeling empty and chilled to the bone. This track seems to suggest that maybe the worst horror is knowing that nothing may get better after all. Clipping knows the existential fear that most of us live in, and you can sense this fear throughout the album. 

The compositions are jarring and unnerving, and the lyrics are decidedly dark, but Visions of Bodies Being Burned is a poignant meditation on the state of our society. Give it a listen, if you dare. 

Written by Noah Larsen