Death Grips

Death Grips is an experimental music group formed in Sacramento, California in 2010.^[1] The trio consists of MC Ride (Stefan Burnett) on vocals, Zach Hill on drums and production, and Andy Morin on keyboards, sampling, and production. Their music synthesizes noise rock, industrial hip-hop, and electronic experimentation into a body of work that has had an outsized influence on independent music since the early 2010s.

MC Ride studied visual arts at Hampton University in Virginia before dropping out and returning to Sacramento,^[2] where he worked at local establishments including Paesano's Midtown and Pushkin's Bakery while painting and making music.^[2] Before Death Grips, he rapped under the name Mxlplx in a trio called Fyre alongside his brother.^[2] He maintains a parallel career as a visual artist, creating dark, monochromatic acrylic paintings, and in early 2019 mounted his first solo gallery exhibition at Slow Culture in Los Angeles.^[3] Notoriously private and media-averse, he has described himself as deeply distrustful of people in general and of press specifically, a disposition that has shaped the band's entire public posture.

Zach Hill co-founded the influential noise rock duo Hella before Death Grips and is widely recognized for his technically chaotic drumming style. He is also an active solo artist and visual artist.^[1] Andy Morin, the most private of the three members, handles engineering and production and has been credited across the entirety of the band's studio output.

The band broke through with their 2011 mixtape Exmilitary and signed to Epic Records in 2012, releasing The Money Store to widespread critical acclaim. Exmilitary opened with a sample of Charles Manson's voice, establishing an early preoccupation with American cult mythology and institutional violence that would resurface across the band's career.^[1] They were subsequently dropped from Epic after deliberately leaking their second album No Love Deep Web before its official release.^[1] Recorded between May and August 2012 without outside producers or guest collaborators, the album featured Zach Hill playing all drums live on electronic and acoustic kits, producing a rawer, more physical sound than anything the band had made before.^[20] The album's explicit cover art sparked additional controversy, which the band framed in terms of spiritual fearlessness, anti-homophobia, and a rejection of the hypermasculine posturing they felt was projected onto them.^[21] The self-leak became one of the defining acts of digital-era music distribution, with the album topping BitTorrent download charts. This confrontational gesture established the band's reputation as an institution-burning force that would define their public identity ever since.^[20]

The Money Store yielded a particularly lasting cultural contribution in the form of a single word. The song "I've Seen Footage" introduced "noided" (a compression of "paranoided") into digital slang, capturing a specific state of surveillance anxiety and media-induced paranoia that resonated across internet communities.^[25] The album's impact extended beyond its immediate audience: multiple critics noted its fingerprints on Kanye West's 2013 record Yeezus, credited it as one of the records that shifted the direction of experimental and industrial hip-hop in the years that followed. Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop awarded the album a perfect 10, his first at the time, framing it as an expansion of what aggressive music could achieve intellectually.^[26]

Hill described the band's compositional philosophy in a 2012 interview as a process of recycling and destruction: sourcing raw material from unconventional places, building elaborate structures around it, and then deliberately dismantling those structures^[23]. The resulting music, he noted, was not abstract in its origins. It was a direct response to what the band observed around them: tent cities, riots, a social fabric under visible pressure. In a rare interview from the same period, the band articulated one of their core artistic goals as producing a visceral, physical response in listeners^[24]. That goal has remained consistent across their entire catalog.

In 2013, Death Grips launched their own imprint, Third Worlds, and began work on Government Plates. During this period they also engaged in a pattern of deliberate show cancellations, including a high-profile no-show at a Lollapalooza afterparty in Chicago where an audience of fans destroyed the unoccupied stage.^[1] The band later characterized these cancellations as intentional artistic choices. Government Plates itself was released as a surprise free download on November 13, 2013 -- no advance notice, no singles, music videos for all eleven tracks uploaded simultaneously. Its title referenced government license plates as a symbol of surveillance and unaccountable institutional power, themes that arrived at a culturally charged moment following the Snowden NSA revelations earlier that year.^[1] In 2014 the band announced their breakup while simultaneously leaking the first half of their next double album, The Powers That B. The breakup proved to be short-lived, and Death Grips have continued to release music and tour in the years since.^[1]

The 2014-2015 period surrounding The Powers That B was among the band's most theatrically charged. The first disc, Niggas on the Moon, featured an unusual collaboration: Bjork provided original vocal recordings specifically for the project, which Zach Hill then chopped, pitched, and processed beyond recognition into the fabric of the instrumentation.^[17] Bjork described herself as their "found object" and endorsed the collaboration publicly. Their July 2014 breakup announcement arrived as a handwritten message photographed and posted to social media -- not a label statement but a napkin note declaring the band at its best and therefore finished. The intervening months saw them release Fashion Week (January 2015), an instrumental album whose track titles, read in sequence, spelled "JENNY DEATH WHEN" -- a sardonic taunt directed at fans awaiting the unreleased second disc of The Powers That B. The completed double album arrived March 31, 2015, and was received as their most emotionally affecting and compositionally advanced work to that point, earning an 8.4/10 from Pitchfork.^[15] Days before its official release, the band announced a North American tour -- returning before their final album had even officially come out.^[16]

The announcement of Bottomless Pit in October 2015 came through footage of Karen Black, the actress who had died in August 2013, reciting lines from a screenplay written by Zach Hill. The posthumous quality of the announcement set the tone for the record. In the lead-up to the album's May 2016 release, the band released their complete lyrics as a downloadable ZIP file and conducted what they called "Interview 2016": a 32-minute video of the band with an interviewer in which all audio is stripped out, replaced with instrumental music. You can see mouths moving. You hear nothing said.^[11][13] The album also marked the first time the band worked with an outside collaborator in an extended capacity: Nick Reinhart, guitarist of experimental art-rock band Tera Melos, contributed guitar throughout the record, a decision that gave the album a hookier, more textured quality without softening its edges. Bottomless Pit earned an 8.1 from Pitchfork and widespread critical recognition as one of the band's most cohesive records, synthesizing their noise-rock and electronic impulses into tighter song structures while losing none of their ferocity.^[12]

In May 2017, the band released Steroids (Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabber Megamix), a 22-minute single uploaded directly to YouTube without conventional release mechanics, demonstrating their continued preference for unmediated distribution.^[1] That autumn they co-headlined a major North American tour with industrial metal band Ministry, playing more than twenty dates across October and November 2017.^[1] Work on Year of the Snitch proceeded concurrently, recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood with an eclectic group of collaborators including Tool bassist Justin Chancellor, noise artist Lucas Abela, film director Andrew Adamson, and turntablist DJ Swamp, who contributed scratched samples drawn from the band's own earlier catalog.

In 2018, Death Grips released Year of the Snitch, their seventh studio album, through their own Third Worlds imprint and Harvest Records. The record debuted at number 97 on the Billboard 200 and reached number 10 on the Top Alternative Albums chart.^[4] The sessions were unusually collaborative, bringing in DJ Swamp (turntablist), Justin Chancellor (bassist for Tool), noise artist Lucas Abela, and director Andrew Adamson. The album's title references themes of surveillance, betrayal, and exposure, and the record as a whole cycles through paranoia, isolation, and psychological extremity, territory Death Grips had staked out from the beginning but mapped with new density. It was released the same day as Nine Inch Nails' Bad Witch, a pairing that critics read as a signal about the continued vitality of industrial and noise-adjacent music.^[4]

Death Grips' influence extended beyond their immediate scene. David Bowie cited the band as a significant influence on his later work,^[5] and by the end of the 2010s major publications were asking whether Death Grips constituted the most important hip-hop act of the decade, a measure of how far their confrontational approach had traveled from Sacramento's margins to the center of independent music's critical conversation.^[5]

In November 2025, Andy Morin announced his departure from Death Grips. Zach Hill and MC Ride confirmed that the band would continue releasing music as a duo, marking the end of the original trio lineup that had defined the group since its formation in 2010.^[2]