The Powers That B

The Shape of a Contradiction

Death Grips have always operated at extremes, but The Powers That B makes extremity structural. Released in full on March 31, 2015^[1], the album is a double disc whose two halves barely resemble each other. The first, Niggas on the Moon, is claustrophobic and electronic, built almost entirely on a Roland V-Drum kit and heavily processed vocal samples. The second, Jenny Death, is loud, guitar-driven, and emotionally direct by the band's standards. Together they form something critics have described as an ambitious unified statement and two separate albums pressed into an uncomfortable partnership.

That discomfort is the point.

Fragmenting the Familiar

The first disc's most striking formal choice involves its source material. Bjork's voice, one of the most distinctive and legible instruments in contemporary music, runs throughout Niggas on the Moon, but reduced to percussion: chopped, looped, stripped of melody. Bjork confirmed the collaboration publicly the day after the album's surprise release^[2], describing herself as thrilled to be involved. But collaboration may be too gentle a word for what Death Grips do here. They treat her vocals as raw material, fracturing them until any trace of their origin dissolves.

The strategy says something about the album's larger project. The Powers That B is obsessed with what happens when recognizable things get broken down. Identities, genres, narratives, and selves are all subjected to the same process. Nothing that enters the album comes out whole.

The first disc's production creates a sense of information overload without resolution. Zach Hill's V-Drum performances produce rhythms that sound electronic but originate from a live performer, blurring the line between organic and synthetic.^[1] MC Ride's vocal delivery amplifies this: his performance style, which critics have compared variously to rap, spoken word, and industrial noise, has no clean genre home. The disc is exhausting almost by design, accumulating pressure that demands some kind of release.

The Performance of Dissolution

That release, when it comes, arrives by a circuitous route. The backstory of the album is part of the album.

In July 2014, between the two discs' releases, Death Grips announced their breakup via a handwritten note posted to social media, canceling a planned tour and leaving the second disc undelivered.^[1] This was treated by fans and press as chaotic self-destruction, consistent with a band that had already alienated a major label by leaking their own record with a provocative cover photo.

Then, in January 2015, Death Grips released Fashion Week, a wholly instrumental album with no announcement. Its track titles, read in sequence, spelled out a message directed at fans who had been waiting for the second disc.^[3] The move was equal parts trolling and performance art: an acknowledgment that the audience's anticipation had itself become a text to manipulate.

When Jenny Death finally arrived, it landed with the force of something deliberately withheld. The gap between the discs, shaped by the announced breakup and the cryptic teaser, is itself a kind of composition: negative space that Death Grips constructed and then filled with noise.

Into the Wreckage

Jenny Death sounds like a band letting go of restraint that was already minimal. Where the first disc compresses and fragments, the second one explodes outward. Guitar-driven tracks dominate, and the production is rawer and more physical. Nick Reinhart of Tera Melos contributes guitar work that critics noted for its dynamism, with the disc referencing hardcore punk, noise rock, and post-rock simultaneously.^[4]

The shift is deliberate. By making the two discs so sonically distant, Death Grips refuse the comfort of coherence. A listener who finds the second disc more accessible than the first is experiencing exactly what the album's structure sets up. The contradiction is the product.

Throughout Jenny Death, the lyrical texture grows more direct. The abstracted hostility that characterizes much of the band's work gives way, in places, to something more legible as personal experience. The album does not explain itself, but it begins, unusually for Death Grips, to feel located in a particular person's interiority.

The Unmasking

The album's most unsettling and perhaps most significant moment comes near its end. On the penultimate track, MC Ride, whose real name is Stefan Burnett, refers to himself by his first name rather than his stage persona. The track, built on sustained guitar and relentless percussion, traces a speaker confronting suicidal ideation with an unflinching specificity.^[5]

In a catalog full of armor, it is the moment where the armor comes off.

Death Grips' approach has always been aggression as performance, discomfort as art practice. The strategic provocations, the label battles, the announced breakup: all of it functions as armor against legibility. To be understood is to be dismissed. So the appearance of Stefan rather than MC Ride, in a song about whether to keep living, feels genuinely alarming. It is the record's emotional core.

What the Title Means

The phrase "the powers that be" refers to entrenched institutional authority: governments, corporations, cultural arbiters. By rendering "be" as a letter, Death Grips perform a small but pointed act of linguistic seizure, replacing grammatical convention with something vernacular and abbreviated.

By 2015, Death Grips had already demonstrated what confrontation with institutional power looks like in practice. They had leaked their own major-label album, stood up audiences, and operated on a schedule that answered to no industry logic. The album's title is not abstract.^[6]

The double album form also functions as a kind of declaration. In 2015, double albums were not commercially rational. The Powers That B debuted at No. 72 on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of around 9,000 copies.^[1] Death Grips had no hit singles, no radio presence, and no crossover appeal in any conventional sense. Yet their cultural footprint consistently exceeded their numbers. The question of whether Death Grips might be among the most culturally significant hip-hop acts of their era by influence rather than sales^[7] frames a real tension about what power in music actually looks like.

The End That Wasn't

The album closes with an instrumental track that functions as an epilogue and a question mark. After the rawness of the preceding song, pure instrumentation feels like what comes after language fails. Whether it signals death, transformation, or merely pause, it refuses to answer.

The closing track's title contains the band's own name followed by a version number, suggesting continuation and mutation rather than finality. It is a band that announced its own death releasing an album that stages a personal death, closing with a track named after a future version of itself.^[8]

The double album format lets Death Grips say two things at once: destruction and reconstruction, abstraction and rawness, performance and sincerity. What makes The Powers That B remarkable is not that it resolves these contradictions. It is that it holds them in place long enough to make you feel their weight.