Released on March 14, 2025,
on Sub Pop.
The latest album by clipping. opens with the ancestral sound of a modem – and that says it all.
It says it all about the theme. Five and six years after the acclaimed There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Visions of Bodies Being Burned, two releases labeled as horrorcore, the trio moves on to a new concept. As its title – drawn from the opening line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer – suggests, Dead Channel Sky is intended as their cyberpunk album. It revels in oppressive science-fiction soundscapes and machine noises (glitches, feedback, static, interference, android voices) to explore the dangers and pitfalls of our hyperconnected age. Daveed Diggs shares his visions of a frightening near future shaped by alienating technology, disorientation in virtual worlds (“Welcome Home Warrior”), a repressive society, rebellious hackers, and a domineering scammer (“Scam,” featuring in-house rapper Tia Nomore). The references are clear: William Gibson, of course, but also Philip K. Dick, Avatar, and the cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades.
The modem sound also speaks volumes about the era the California trio revisits. Dead Channel Sky draws inspiration from the music that served as the soundtrack to the early days of the Internet in the 1990s. The album is filled with house-flavored tracks (“Mirrorshades pt. 2”), techno (“Run It”), drum and bass (“Dodger,” “Malleus,” “Ask What Happened”), big beat (“Change the Channel”), and more extreme electronic experiments (the experimental “Simple Degradation” and “From Bright Bodies”). It also reinterprets “Dominator” by the Dutch group Human Resource, a classic of the genre.
A group fascinated by sonic experimentation and dystopian science fiction, likely captivating rock fans more than rap purists (they are signed to Sub Pop, after all). A political message, urging us to free ourselves from the new artificial paradises that social networks have become (“Ask What Happened”). A concept-driven rapper who delivers his lyrics at breakneck speed and revisits the marriage of hip-hop and electronic music once orchestrated by Afrika Bambaataa, Mantronix, and the whole electro-rap movement… Doesn’t that ring a bell?
Of course it does. You’re inevitably thinking of the late-1990s underground hip-hop movement, represented here by one of its heroes, Aesop Rock. And since we listened to all of that a great deal back then – and since clipping. took their time, five long years, to craft this latest release (admittedly, Daveed Diggs’s parallel career as an actor can’t have helped) – the result can only strike us as a success. Aside from a few obligatory studio tinkering moments and some pompous spoken word (“Polaroids”), this may well be the most accessible album yet from the California experimenters.