Ha Ha Ha

There is a specific kind of laugh that communicates not joy but contempt, the laugh that says you have arrived too late and understood nothing. It is the laugh of someone who has already moved on before you realized they were moving. That laugh sits at the center of "Hahaha" by Death Grips, and it tells you nearly everything about where the band was in the summer of 2018 and what they thought of themselves, their past, and anyone still trying to catch up.

A Band at Uneasy Peace

Death Grips released Year of the Snitch on June 22, 2018, two years after Bottomless Pit and four years after the theatrical fake breakup that shocked fans while changing nothing fundamental about the band's actual existence.^[2] By 2018, Stefan Burnett (MC Ride), Zach Hill, and Andy Morin had settled into an unlikely stability. Signed to their own Third Worlds imprint distributed through Harvest Records, they operated outside the traditional music industry with a near-total absence of press appearances, interviews, or public explanations.^[3] The album was promoted exclusively through social media posts and audio uploads to their YouTube channel. They allowed the music to speak without translation.

The album was recorded at Sunset Sound, a legendary Los Angeles studio with a history stretching back to sessions by the Rolling Stones and Prince. The choice of venue was not incidental. Death Grips in a hallowed recording space signals a kind of confrontation with tradition, the band dragging a decades-old institution into their specific brand of noise-driven chaos. For this album they enlisted DJ Swamp as a near-permanent collaborator, using the turntablist to scratch and cut previous Death Grips recordings throughout the record.^[2] This self-cannibalization became the defining sonic strategy of the album, and "Hahaha" is where it reaches its most disorienting peak.

The album title references Linda Kasabian, the Manson Family member who turned state's witness against Charles Manson in the Tate-LaBianca murder trials. That Death Grips would align themselves with snitch mythology, an identity historically stigmatized in hip-hop culture, is characteristically perverse. The album's release date coincided with Kasabian's 69th birthday.^[2] The title sets a tone for the entire record: preoccupied with betrayal, testimony, and the violence of disclosure.

The Song Itself

"Hahaha" was released as the fourth pre-album single on June 7, 2018.^[1][4][6] It arrives as the sixth track on Year of the Snitch, positioned in the heart of the record where the density of ideas is thickest. Critics described it as "a vertigo-inducing storm of guitar riffs, record scratches, and interspliced vocals,"^[4] with sounds firing from all directions in a production that is deliberately crowded and chaotic. The 3:35 track offers no extended breathing room. It arrives at full intensity and stays there.

Haunted by Its Own Catalog

The most analytically striking feature of "Hahaha" is its reliance on self-sampling. DJ Swamp scratches and manipulates material drawn from across the Death Grips discography: recordings from The Money Store (2012), No Love Deep Web (2012), Government Plates (2013), and The Powers That B (2015) all surface in distorted, refracted form.^[7] The effect is of a band being chased by its own discography, or perhaps of the band itself doing the chasing, pulling earlier versions of their work into a blender and pressing play.

This kind of self-sampling is unusual in hip-hop, where artists typically borrow from others rather than themselves. Here it functions as something between archaeological excavation and deliberate destruction of the archive. DJ Swamp does not treat these sources with reverence. The older material is scratched, stuttered, and manipulated until it becomes barely recognizable, familiar only to listeners who have lived with the catalog long enough to hear ghosts in the noise. What results is not nostalgia but something closer to self-interrogation: the band putting its own past on the stand.

The Fall connection deepens this effect. A sample from the British post-punk group's 1993 track "Paranoia Man in Cheap Shit Room" surfaces in the mix, one of the few instances on the album where Death Grips borrows from outside their own catalog.^[7] Mark E. Smith's group was one of the foundational units of abrasive, paranoid, anti-commercial noise rock, working in the same tradition of uncompromising hostility that Death Grips inhabit. Dropping a Fall sample into this particular song amounts to a lineage claim, acknowledging where this kind of noise was born and what it sounds like when it recurs in a new generation.

The Laugh as Weapon

The central refrain is the track's defining gesture. MC Ride delivers the title phrase as declaration, taunt, warning, and joke all at once.^[1] The laugh is weaponized, stripped of warmth and left as pure aggression. It reads as defiance directed outward, at critics, at fans who expect some version of consistency, at the music industry that spent years trying to categorize or contain the group. But the laughter also carries an absurdist quality: the sound of someone who has transcended caring whether the laugh lands. It is not an invitation. It is a door closing.

The lyrics also contain one of the more deliberately absurd moments in the band's catalog, a reference to the classic video game character Sonic the Hedgehog embedded in otherwise confrontational language about speed and ownership.^[5] This kind of deliberate tonal collision is characteristic of the group at its most playful and most aggressive simultaneously. Inserting a nostalgic pop-culture icon into a track this dense and confrontational creates a collision that is genuinely funny without becoming less serious. It is the sound of someone who refuses to be taken entirely at face value even at the moment of maximum intensity.

Critical Reception and Cultural Position

Critics were divided on whether Year of the Snitch represented Death Grips at their most liberated or most willfully inaccessible. The Needle Drop placed "Hahaha" among the band's most disorienting and multi-faceted tracks.^[8] Rolling Stone called the album a "cyber-noise punk-rap disruption" and praised its confrontational energy.^[9] Pitchfork found it fun and explosive while noting the album lacked a clear conceptual target to give it maximum meaning.^[2] The album reached number 97 on the Billboard 200 and number 10 on the Top Alternative Albums chart, confirming the band's sustained relevance outside the mainstream.

"Hahaha" sits at the center of that critical tension. It is one of the album's densest tracks, but also one of the most deliberately anti-explanatory. A song that samples its own catalog, references Sonic the Hedgehog, borrows from post-punk history, and wraps everything in a recurring taunting laugh is not making an argument so much as staging a controlled explosion. The meaning is in the act of assembly, in the refusal to present that assembly as anything other than what it is.

In a genre where legacy tends to be curated with careful attention, Death Grips' willingness to treat their own catalog as raw material is genuinely unusual. Most artists protect the archive. Death Grips feeds it into a sampler and lets DJ Swamp chop it up. The laugh that gives "Hahaha" its title is the sound of a band that has decided its own history is just another instrument to be used.

What the Joke Might Be

Without statements from any member of the band, interpretations of "Hahaha" remain necessarily speculative. Death Grips gave no press interviews for this album cycle, releasing the record with no explanatory context.^[3] One reading positions the song's laugh as directed inward: a group reckoning with the absurdity of its own career trajectory, from Sacramento noise experiments to major label fiascos and a public breakup to independent stability, and finding the whole arc genuinely funny. The heavy self-sampling supports this reading. Listening to your own earlier recordings is already a strange experience. Turning them into abrasive noise seems almost like a form of therapy.

Another reading frames the song as a commentary on internet culture, which Death Grips both influenced and satirized throughout their career. Year of the Snitch repeatedly engages with the toxicity of online fandom and digital paranoia, most explicitly on its opening track. "Hahaha," released a week before the album, positions the recurring laugh as a response to that culture: the sound of someone watching information circulate, mutate, and exhaust itself, and finding the whole spectacle bleakly hilarious. The "HA HA HA" becomes an internet meme the band authored and then immediately consumed.

The Joke That Is Also Serious

"Hahaha" is not a song that courts extended reflection. It is designed to be experienced as impact, as a burst of chaotic sound that arrives, does its work, and moves on. But within that brevity and that chaos, there is a genuine artistic position: the past is not sacred, the archive is raw material, and the appropriate response to a career as strange and improbable as Death Grips' is exactly the kind of laughter they provide.

It is the laugh of a band that has survived its own supposed death, its major label fiasco, and years of willful incomprehensibility, and found that it is still standing, still making noise, still refusing to explain itself. The joke is real. Whether you are in on it remains, as always with this group, entirely your problem.