Flies

There is a particular kind of surrender that goes past wanting to disappear and arrives somewhere stranger: wanting to be actively consumed, broken down, and carried off piece by piece by something that has no interest in your dignity. That is the imaginative territory "Flies" stakes out. Over two and a half minutes of jagged, buzzing production, Death Grips' MC Ride doesn't sing about dying so much as about what should happen to the body once it's already gone, inviting a plague of insects to finish the job.

It's an ugly, uncomfortable image, and it's meant to be. Death Grips have never been a band interested in making listeners feel good, and "Flies" might be the purest distillation of that refusal on an album that otherwise spends a fair amount of time chasing hooks and rock textures. Understanding what the song is doing means looking at where it sits in the band's story, how it was built, and what critics heard in it when it first surfaced.

A Deliberately Confrontational Single

"Flies" was released as a single on May 22, 2018, arriving with a music video a month ahead of its parent album, Year of the Snitch^[1]. It was written by Zach Hill and Stefan Burnett (MC Ride), and it landed in the middle of an unusually active promotional rollout for a band that had built its reputation on surprise releases and total media silence^[2]. The album arrived that June through the band's own Third Worlds imprint in partnership with Harvest Records, the product of sessions at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood that, unusually for Death Grips, brought in outside collaborators including a turntablist who worked directly with the group's own back catalog^[2].

That detail matters for "Flies" specifically, because the track is built in part from samples of three earlier Death Grips songs: "I've Seen Footage" and "System Blower," both from 2012's The Money Store, and "Spread Eagle Cross the Block" from 2011's Exmilitary^[1]. The song is, quite literally, built out of the band eating its own history.

Decay, Disgust, and the Desire to Be Undone

The lyrics themselves are sparse and abstract, but critics who have parsed them consistently land on the same territory: death, decomposition, and a narrator who seems to actively welcome being reduced to rotting matter, inviting insects to feed on and break down what's left of him^[4]. Rather than treating mortality as something to be feared or mourned, the song leans into physical disgust as a kind of destination, imagery of infestation, sickness, and bodily collapse standing in for a mind that has stopped resisting its own unraveling.

That posture fits comfortably inside MC Ride's larger body of work. Across the band's catalog, he has repeatedly used the body itself, its fluids, its breakdown, its animal impulses, as the site where psychological extremity gets expressed, favoring visceral, physical imagery over anything resembling a tidy narrative. "Flies" pushes that tendency about as far as it can go: there's no metaphorical distance left between the speaker and the swarm he's calling toward himself.

Color shows up as part of that same disgust, most notably a recurring image of sickly green, which critics have connected both to jealousy and to physical illness, the kind of bruised, infected hue a body might take on as it starts to break down^[4]. It's a small detail, but it reinforces the song's larger strategy: rather than describing decay abstractly, the lyrics keep returning to specific, stomach-turning sensory details, color, texture, motion, that make the imagined rot feel almost tactile.

The choice to build the track's instrumental out of recycled fragments of the band's own earlier songs reinforces the theme on a structural level. A song about wanting to be consumed and broken down is itself assembled from consumed and broken-down pieces of Death Grips' past output^[1]. The record isn't just describing decomposition, it's enacting a version of it, cannibalizing its own discography the way the lyrics imagine insects cannibalizing a body.

Sound as Subject Matter

Critics who reviewed the single on release tended to describe it in terms that mirror its subject matter almost exactly. One writer for Consequence of Sound heard the track as evoking an actual swarm of winged creatures, pointing to its erratic rhythm, whirring synthesizer lines, and swirling drones underneath MC Ride's characteristic bark^[1]. The production doesn't illustrate the song's imagery so much as become it: the beat lurches and stutters the way a cloud of insects moves, dense, directionless, and slightly nauseating.

Within the context of Year of the Snitch as a whole, "Flies" has been singled out as maybe the most straightforwardly abrasive thing on the record, and by extension one of the most representative Death Grips songs on an album that otherwise reaches outward into rock, punk, and even gabber textures^[3]. One reviewer went so far as to describe it as scatterbrained almost by design, calling it close to what the band sounds like to someone who has never heard them before: pure, unfiltered confrontation, distilled into two and a half minutes^[3].

That impression is amplified by the accompanying video, which strips away almost anything resembling a conventional performance. MC Ride is shown jumping and convulsing in a parking lot in front of a yin-yang mural, the footage interrupted by strobe effects and jagged digital glitches, a visual language that matches the song's refusal to resolve into anything comfortable or coherent.

A Band Built on Privacy, Suddenly Turned Outward

Year of the Snitch occupies an odd position in the Death Grips story. This is a band whose identity was forged through refusal: refusing label control, refusing interviews, refusing to show up to shows they'd committed to playing. But the sessions for this record brought in more outside collaborators than any previous Death Grips album, and the promotional cycle, five advance singles, an elaborate tracklist reveal video, was more conventional than almost anything the band had done before^[2]. One critic read this tension as the album's real subject: a historically insular band figuring out how to let people in without losing the thing that made them dangerous in the first place, using their old adversary, social media and public attention, as material rather than something to simply resist^[3].

"Flies" sits at an interesting angle to that reading. It's arguably the least outward-facing, least collaborative-sounding thing on the record, a pure blast of the band's oldest instincts even as it's technically built from a guest turntablist's manipulation of their catalog. It reads almost like a control variable: proof that no matter how many new voices entered the room, the band could still produce something this uncompromising.

Critics have also pointed to Del the Funky Homosapien's 2000 concept album Deltron 3030 as a useful reference point for understanding where Death Grips are coming from more broadly, both artists sharing a deep suspicion of technology and institutional power, a fixation on alienation, and a habit of treating music itself as one of the only available escapes from an otherwise dystopian surrounding environment^[3]. "Flies" fits that lineage in its own way: it's less a song about the world outside the narrator than about a mind that has turned entirely inward, using the body's own collapse as the last available refuge from everything pressing in on it.

Other Ways to Hear It

Because MC Ride's lyrics are so deliberately abstract, "Flies" supports more than one reading. Taken at face value, it can be heard as a bleak but almost meditative acceptance of mortality: bodies decompose, insects are part of that cycle, and there's a kind of dark peace available in imagining your own return to that process rather than fighting it.

A second reading leans on the album's broader preoccupations with surveillance, exposure, and betrayal, the same territory suggested by the record's title and by the track referencing Linda Kasabian's story^[2]. Under that lens, the desire to be picked apart and consumed reads less like a meditation on death in general and more like a specific response to being endlessly examined, discussed, and picked over by an audience and a media apparatus that never stops circling. The swarm becomes a stand-in for public attention itself, something the narrator has decided to stop fending off and instead invite in.

A third, more skeptical reading simply takes the band at their word about their own process: that meaning is secondary to feeling, and that a track like this is meant to be experienced as a physical jolt rather than decoded like a puzzle. Under that view, "Flies" isn't really about anything external at all, it's a controlled release of disgust and aggression, valuable for the sensation it produces rather than any message underneath it.

Why It Still Lands

Part of what makes "Flies" resonate is how uncomfortable it stays even inside a discography built on discomfort. Death Grips have spent over a decade finding new ways to make bodily abjection feel urgent rather than shock-value, and this track distills that skill to its rawest form: no narrative scaffolding, no hook to soften the imagery, just a direct, almost physiological confrontation with decay.

It also works as a kind of thesis statement for Year of the Snitch's underlying paradox, a band famous for guarding its privacy making one of its most collaborative records, and responding to that exposure not by softening but by producing one of its most viscerally unguarded songs. "Flies" doesn't resolve that tension. It just turns the volume up on it, and lets the swarm do the rest.