No Love Deep Web

No Love Deep Web is the second studio album by Death Grips, recorded between May and August 2012 at the Sacramento apartment MC Ride and Zach Hill shared at the time.^[1] The band cancelled their supporting tour for The Money Store specifically to retreat and make this record, which emerged as darker, more minimal, and more confrontational than its predecessor. The band described the album as "the heaviest thing we have made so far." A key production distinction: Zach Hill played every beat live on a Roland electronic V-drum kit or acoustic drums, with no manually programmed sequences anywhere on the record, giving the album a visceral, biological pulse.^[1]

The albums release became one of the most discussed artist-label confrontations of the digital era. When Epic Records refused to authorize a 2012 release date, Death Grips responded on October 1, 2012 by self-releasing the full album for free through their website, SoundCloud, and BitTorrent, with the explicit note that "the label will be hearing the album for the first time with you."^[1] It was downloaded more than 34 million times via BitTorrent alone. Epic sent a cease-and-desist citing willful copyright infringement. Death Grips published the labels private emails on Facebook. By November, the band had been dropped.

In the lead-up to the albums announcement, Death Grips orchestrated an elaborate alternate reality game across the dark web, contributing to the records mystique.^[2] A 2022 retrospective marking the albums tenth anniversary called the self-release "probably the most blatant subversion of a major label in the digital age" and described the record as "a pure distillation of their essence," noting it was chronically underappreciated within Death Grips own catalog.^[2]

The album artwork, a macro photograph of an erect penis with the album title written on it, was framed by the band as a statement about fearlessness and dismantling taboos. Zach Hill described the imagery as representing "fearlessness" and "pushing past everything that makes people slaves."

Critically, the album received a Metacritic score of 76/100.^[3] Pitchfork gave it 8.2 out of 10, and it topped BitTorrents list of most legally downloaded music in 2012.