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Death Grips - Year of the Snitch (Third World/Harvest, 2018)

Exmilitary and The Money Store are two A1 albums. Then No Love Deep Web came which was a little more hit and miss, and Government Plates followed which was okay but still more miss than hit. The first disc of The Powers That B, Niggas on the Moon, dropped and it was mostly blah. About that point I checked out for good. It's roughly the same time they went silent and worked on the second disc of TPTB, Jenny Death, for about a year. One day I saw they released a cut from that disc, "Inanimate Sensation", and it rocked my face off. I was back. DxG was back. Jenny Death was released and by far the best thing they'd done since the Exmilitary/Money Store days. Since then they've only gotten more erratic - a couple of instrumental EPs, a one-off with Les Claypool, a 20+ minute "megamix". The next album they released in and amongst those, Bottomless Pit, was fine, not terribly adventurous but not bad. Year of the Snitch falls into that category too and kind of feels like a sister album to Bottomless Pit in some ways. Musically it is quite similar to the "Steroids" megamix, very heavy on the electro and less concerned with hip hop or pop stylings from the past ("Hacker" seems a million years in the past now). There's some good tracks on here, most of them already released as singles - "Streaky", "Shitshow", "Black Paint", "Hahaha". There's a few gibberish tracks on here like "Death Grips is Online", "Little Richard" and "Dilemma". Again kinda like Bottomless Pit which was the same deal. Occasional brilliance, but not consistent on the level they used to deliver. I'll keep staying tuned to what comes next though.

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