Exmilitary

Exmilitary is the debut mixtape by Death Grips, released as a free download on April 25, 2011, through the Grindcore Karaoke netlabel.^[1] The record arrived with virtually no warning, bypassing conventional music industry channels to land directly in listeners' hands via the internet. It was later pulled from most streaming platforms due to uncleared samples throughout the record, leaving only individual tracks without copyrighted material available on major services.^[1]

Produced by Zach Hill and Andy Morin, the mixtape synthesizes experimental hip-hop, noise rock, industrial, and hardcore punk into a document of life in Sacramento, California, a city the band consistently depicted as a surveillance state in miniature. The city's identity as the state capital, a heavily administered, politically conservative environment, shaped the album's preoccupation with control, policing, and economic marginalization.^[2]

The record opens with a Charles Manson speech sample, immediately establishing its confrontational posture. Across thirteen tracks, MC Ride narrates scenarios of violence, paranoia, drug use, and fugitive flight against a backdrop of alien production that defied easy genre categorization. Exmilitary received a Metacritic score of 82, with Pitchfork calling it "a bludgeoning slab of hostility" that somehow avoided being "an overbearing mess."^[3] Drowned in Sound awarded it 9 out of 10, describing it as functioning like "a well-oiled army cell" whose aggression was "100 per cent anguish."^[4]

The album closed with "Blood Creepin'," a track that had existed in earlier form on the band's self-titled EP from March 2011 and was refined into the mixtape's most extreme and definitive statement.^[1] Its release marked the beginning of one of the most distinctive and influential careers in experimental music of the 2010s.