Birds

Before "Birds" made complete sense, it had to reveal its secret. When Death Grips released the track in August 2013 as the lone preview of what would become Government Plates, it arrived as something genuinely unusual even for them: hypnotic, unexpectedly melancholy, built around a guitar loop that seemed to drift out of pitch as if the recording itself was slowly dissolving. Something in it felt borrowed, faintly alien. Fourteen months later, listeners discovered why. The guitar had been played by Robert Pattinson, one of the most famous actors in the world, captured on an iPhone by drummer Zach Hill and processed into something nearly unrecognizable.

That story is more than trivia. It is a key that unlocks much of what "Birds" is about.

The Chaos That Preceded It

By the summer of 2013, Death Grips had compressed a remarkable amount of conflict into a short career. The Sacramento trio had signed to Epic Records in 2012, released the critically acclaimed The Money Store, and then immediately begun working to destroy the relationship. When Epic refused to confirm a release date for their follow-up No Love Deep Web, the band leaked it themselves, a deliberate breach of contract designed, as Zach Hill later confirmed, to get out of the deal. Epic dropped them in late 2012.^[1]

By mid-2013, they had launched their own imprint, Third Worlds, and were preparing Government Plates for release under a distribution deal with Harvest/Capitol Records. "Birds" arrived as a single on August 21, 2013, the same week the band made headlines for an entirely different reason: they did not appear at their Lollapalooza booking. Instead, a playlist of pre-recorded music played over a PA system while a fan's printed suicide note, written as an email to the band, was displayed on stage. Fans destroyed the equipment left behind. The band later described the note, the recorded music, and the destruction as the intended performance.^[7]

This context matters because it tells you something about the frame in which "Birds" was heard. Death Grips was operating entirely outside normal industry logic, choosing symbolic provocation over commercial promotion, releasing a haunted and melodic song about flight and mortality at the exact moment they were drawing the most chaotic press attention of their careers.

The Hidden Hand

The guitar at the center of "Birds" was reportedly the result of an impromptu, informal exchange. Pattinson, already a longtime admirer of the group, played a riff that Hill captured on his iPhone rather than in any studio setup. That lo-fi recording became the melodic spine of the track after heavy processing.^[2]

Pattinson described his reaction to hearing the finished song as one of the proudest moments of his life.^[3] For Death Grips, a band that has always treated found sound and unconventional sources as raw material, the origin of the riff aligns perfectly with their process. They routinely disassemble the familiar until it becomes something else entirely.

There is also a pointed irony in this that the band could not have been unaware of. Pattinson was, in 2013, among the most photographed and surveilled humans on the planet, a figure whose every movement was documented by tabloid media. Death Grips took his contribution and made it anonymous, stripped of origin, transformed into pure texture. Celebrity dissolved into signal.

Birds, Coffins, and the Weight of Tomorrow

The music video released alongside the album features a rotating transparent coffin as one of its central images, an object that floats and turns while the narrator insists, again and again, that tomorrow is coming.^[9] Taken together, the visual and lyrical combination functions as a memento mori: the acknowledgment that each successive day is also one day closer to the end. Another key image in the video is a palm tree being systematically dismantled while the narrator makes this same forward-looking assertion. Reading the two together, the song suggests that anxiety about the future forecloses the ability to inhabit the present. Paradise is taken apart while you are busy thinking about tomorrow.

The avian imagery in the lyrics threads through this tension between vitality and mortality. Birds, across cultures and literary traditions, represent freedom, transcendence, instinct uncoupled from institutional control. Within the broader landscape of Government Plates, an album whose title invokes government vehicles that observe others while remaining beyond scrutiny themselves, birds become a natural counterpoint: wild, unregistered, impossible to fully track.^[5]

The lyrics enumerate birds against a backdrop of language about war and conflict, placing each creature in a ledger of struggle. Life is fragile here. The birds are not simply symbols of freedom. They are counted, as if tallying something that is being lost.

MC Ride's vocal approach on "Birds" is notably more subdued than on earlier Death Grips material. Where The Money Store placed him front and center as a confrontational, almost violent presence, "Birds" allows his voice to function more as another layer of texture. Phrases repeat and loop. The emotional register is inward rather than outward.^[4] One critic compared the production aesthetic to Boards of Canada, a reference that points toward the track's capacity to generate unease through beauty rather than aggression.

The Surprise and What It Signaled

Government Plates arrived on November 13, 2013, as a free download with no advance notice, no press campaign, and no rollout beyond the "Birds" single released months earlier. Eleven music videos were posted simultaneously with the album.^[6] The music press scrambled to respond. Pitchfork awarded the album Best New Music with an 8.4 score.^[10] Critics recognized it as a genuinely unusual kind of release, one that would become more common over the following decade but was, at that moment in 2013, startling.

"Birds" as the lone preview track had been doing important work in that gap between single and album. It was the public's introduction to what Government Plates would sound like, and it was deliberately misleading in productive ways. The track is among the more melodic and plaintive things in the Death Grips catalog, suggesting a band in a more contemplative mode. The album that followed confirmed this shift toward noise, texture, and abstraction rather than the confrontational rap energy of The Money Store.

The Robert Pattinson revelation, buried in the vinyl edition credits released more than a year after the album dropped, became one of the most circulated pieces of music trivia of the decade and continues to resurface.^[2] It is a perfect story for Death Grips because it encapsulates their contempt for conventional notions of prestige and provenance. The most famous person in the room contributed something anonymous to a record heard by a fraction of his own fan base, and the band kept quiet about it for over a year.

Alternative Readings

There is a surveillance reading of the avian imagery that maps neatly onto the album's title and its 2013 release in the same year Edward Snowden revealed the scope of NSA mass surveillance programs. By 2013, drones were already colloquially called "birds" in military and journalistic contexts. An album named after government tracking vehicles might reasonably suggest that its birds are not only symbols of freedom but also agents of the apparatus being critiqued. Death Grips has always left this kind of ambiguity fully open, refusing to close off interpretation.^[8]

Under this reading, the narrator's enumeration of birds against the language of war becomes more unsettling. Are these birds to be envied for their freedom, or watched because they are watching? The track's emotional pull, its sense of something beautiful becoming gradually wrong as the guitar riff bends out of tune with each repetition, supports both possibilities at once.

Why the Song Endures

"Birds" occupies an unusual position in the Death Grips discography. It is not their most abrasive track, nor their most lyrically dense. But it may be their most emotionally complex, sitting at the intersection of beauty and dread in a way that is genuinely difficult to shake off. The story of its construction, an improvised phone recording transformed by production into something haunting and uncanny, mirrors the song's own content: the ordinary rendered strange, the familiar made alien, tomorrow always approaching from the direction of a transparent coffin.^[2][9]

For listeners who find Death Grips difficult to approach, "Birds" often functions as the entry point. For those already deep in the catalog, it functions as the still center of a turbulent era. Either way, it rewards return.