Disappointed

The Album's Final Provocation

The title is the gag. After twelve tracks of noise-punk assaults, disembodied screaming, and synthesizer mayhem, Death Grips closes Year of the Snitch with the most low-key, emotionally legible word in their vocabulary: disappointed. It is a word your parents use. A word report cards use. A word designed, at maximum, for mild domestic friction. Its deployment here, as the capstone of one of the most abrasive albums in contemporary music, is either a punchline or a statement of philosophy.

Likely both.

Sacramento Chaos, 2018

By the time Year of the Snitch arrived in June 2018, Death Grips had spent eight years systematically dismantling every conventional relationship between artist and audience. The Sacramento trio (MC Ride on vocals, Zach Hill on drums, Andy Morin on electronics and production) had leaked their own album in defiance of Epic Records, announced their breakup via a note left on a napkin, and headlined festivals with no vocalist present. They had amassed an internet cult that worshipped them in direct proportion to their contempt for it.^[2]

Year of the Snitch was their seventh studio album, released through Third Worlds and Harvest Records on June 22, 2018. It debuted at number 97 on the Billboard 200 and reached number 10 on the Top Alternative Albums chart (modest chart success for a band that has never courted commercial appeal in any recognizable sense).^[1]

The album was built around an unusual collection of collaborators. Justin Chancellor, the bassist for Tool, contributed to sessions. Australian noise artist Lucas Abela, turntablist DJ Swamp, and director Andrew Adamson all left fingerprints on the final product.^[1] This collaborative sprawl was itself a form of self-exposure: a band famous for insularity, inviting outsiders in.

MC Ride (Stefan Burnett) spent the months surrounding the album's release as focused on visual art as on music. He shared morbid, monochromatic acrylic paintings publicly in early 2018 and later mounted his first solo gallery exhibition in Los Angeles in early 2019.^[3] The work shared the same mood as the music: dark, uncompromising, refusing reassurance.

Snitching on Themselves

The album's title does not reference informants in the conventional criminal sense. Here, Death Grips are the snitches. The band is confessing, exposing, turning themselves in.^[9] The album's broader arc involves recursive self-betrayal: sampling their own earlier work, cannibalizing their own mythology, revealing the internal contradictions of a band that built an identity on opacity and aggression.

"Disappointed" arrives as track 13 of 13 and functions as the album's final act of self-exposure.^[1] In the Death Grips worldview, the most devastating betrayal is not turning against an enemy but turning against yourself. This track performs that act with almost casual swagger.

The song's production walks a deliberate tonal tightrope. A piano figure runs through the track that critics described as jaunty, even cheerful.^[4] It is precisely the wrong emotional register for the content it accompanies, and that is the point. The incongruity refuses to let disappointment settle into a comfortable emotional posture. You cannot luxuriate in this disappointment. The music will not allow it.

The Audience as Target

Death Grips have always had a complicated, adversarial relationship with their listeners. The band's fanbase is one of the most devoted and internet-obsessed in experimental music, generating an enormous volume of memes, deep-analysis videos, and fan theories. Yet the band has consistently denied that fanbase any access to intimacy or transparency. No interviews about personal life. No tour diaries. No explanatory liner notes. MC Ride described himself as deeply distrustful of human beings in general and of media specifically.^[2]

"Disappointed" addresses this dynamic head-on. The Young Folks described the track as a "tongue-in-cheek response" to those fans who would inevitably criticize the album's sonic evolution.^[7] The song positions Death Grips as preemptively dismissing any listener judgment before it arrives. Whatever you think of the album, whatever you expected, whatever you hoped for: you were wrong to expect anything at all.

This is not mere trolling. It is a coherent artistic philosophy. The band has spent over a decade insisting that music does not owe the listener anything, that the relationship between creator and audience is not a service contract. "Disappointed" is that argument made explicit rather than implied through behavior.

Stereogum's review described the track as Ride directing his aggression at the passivity of his own audience, suggesting that the "disappointment" in the title belongs to the band itself.^[4] There is contempt here, but contempt is a form of engagement. Indifference would not require a song.

The Whisper and the Scream

Within the track, Ride employs a technique that recurs across the album but reaches a particular intensity here: an alternation between near-whispering and full-throated screaming that creates the effect of two voices inhabiting the same body.

This dynamic is not unusual for Death Grips. The band has always operated in extreme registers. But the particular deployment here, as the album's final statement, reads like an internal dialogue between two versions of the narrator: one who recognizes disappointment as a legitimate emotional state (perhaps even feels it himself), and one who refuses to allow that recognition any standing.

Post-Trash's reviewer noted Zach Hill's distinctive drumming and suspected that Justin Chancellor's bass contributions were audible in the track's rhythmic foundation.^[6] Structurally, the track builds from this foundation into something almost celebratory by its final moments. Multiple reviewers called it a "pick-me-up" closer that sends the listener out with energy rather than despair.^[4][7]

That energy is itself an argument. Disappointment, the track insists, is not a paralyzing condition. It is fuel.

Alternative Readings

Not every listener arrives at the "preemptive dismissal of the audience" interpretation. An equally compelling reading positions "Disappointed" as internally directed.

Throughout Year of the Snitch, the band engages in forms of self-accounting that border on self-indictment. If the album is a confession, a self-snitching, then "Disappointed" may be the final admission: that the band is disappointed in itself. In the gap between what they intended and what they made. In the toll that eight years of deliberate chaos has taken. In the version of themselves they perform on stage versus the people who go home afterward.

This reading is harder to reconcile with the track's energetic close but not impossible. The Spectrum Pulse review noted that some of the album's passages never fully resolved their emotional ambiguity, leaving the listener uncertain whether the affect is sincere or performed.^[8] "Disappointed" carries that same unresolved quality. Its positivity might be genuine recovery or it might be a mask.

The two readings are not mutually exclusive. The track may be simultaneously defiant toward the audience and privately conceding something to itself. That ambiguity is entirely characteristic of Death Grips as an artistic project.

The Closer's Weight

Track 13 of 13. The last word.

Album closers do specific work. They determine what the listener carries out with them. After all the dissonance and aggression of Year of the Snitch (after "Black Paint," "Flies," "Shitshow," and the rest), the question of what note to end on is not trivial.

Death Grips answers with a word that refuses finality. "Disappointed" is not a conclusion. It is a posture. It does not resolve the album's themes so much as fold them back on themselves. The surveillance and self-betrayal of the preceding twelve tracks culminate not in revelation but in the simplest possible emotional report: we did not meet expectations. No one did.

A critical analysis of the album noted that the record functions as a deconstruction of Death Grips' own mythology, a band turning its analytical tools on itself.^[9] If that reading holds, "Disappointed" is where the deconstruction lands. The myth, examined, yields exactly this: a feeling everyone recognizes, stripped of any pretense that artistic ambition insulates you from it.

Why This Song Stays With You

"Disappointed" works as a closer because it refuses to let the album end on its own terms. The energy of the track insists you cannot simply file Year of the Snitch away as an "experimental record" or a "challenging listen" and walk away. The song makes a direct claim on your attention by naming the emotion you were probably trying to avoid having.

Rolling Stone's review noted that Death Grips occupy a unique position in contemporary music: perpetually agitated, politically agnostic, and resistant to the contextualizing narratives that most artists use to explain themselves.^[5] "Disappointed" is that resistance made explicit. No context. No explanation. Just the word, and the dare to feel it.

What lingers is not the specifics of any lyrical moment but the structure of the provocation itself. A band closing an album by naming the thing their audience might be thinking is either enormous courage or elaborate performance. With Death Grips, the gap between those two possibilities has always been the most interesting space in their work.

"Disappointed" lives in that gap.