Linda's in Custody

The album title Year of the Snitch announces its obsession immediately: someone talked. Someone broke ranks, chose survival over loyalty, and the group paid for it. Death Grips built an entire record around this single premise, and no track on the album makes that premise more specific, more historically weighted, or more unsettling than "Linda's in Custody." The title reduces a life-altering legal ordeal to four flat, declarative words. It does not speculate or editorialize. It simply states a condition, the way a police blotter would.

Sacramento, Hollywood, and the Snitch Economy

By 2018, Death Grips had spent nearly a decade operating at the fringes of whatever genre could claim them. The Sacramento trio, MC Ride (Stefan Burnett) on vocals, Zach Hill on drums and production, and Andy Morin on keyboards and engineering, had built a catalog that treated noise, hip-hop, industrial electronics, and hardcore punk not as genres to borrow from but as raw materials to grind together until something new and abrasive emerged.^[1]

Their history with institutional music made the album title especially loaded. In 2012, they signed to Epic Records, released The Money Store to considerable critical acclaim, and were almost immediately dropped after deliberately leaking their second Epic album before its official release. They had, in effect, snitched on themselves. Their willingness to blow up their own career in public, with maximum inconvenience to everyone around them, had become as much a part of their identity as anything in their music.^[2]

Year of the Snitch was recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders in Hollywood during 2017 and 2018. The sessions brought in an unusual roster: Justin Chancellor of Tool contributed bass, Australian noise artist Lucas Abela was involved in production, and turntablist DJ Swamp appeared on the majority of the album's tracks. Swamp's contribution shaped the record's particular texture, drawing on fragments of the band's own earlier catalog and rewiring them into new contexts, giving the album an inward and self-cannibalizing quality.^[1]

The album was announced via a cryptic black-and-white image posted to the band's website in March 2018, with almost no accompanying explanation. When fans leaked information about the project to Reddit, the band's only Twitter response was two words: "Someone snitched." That comment was deadpan humor, but it was also a thematic preview for everything that followed.^[1]

The Linda Kasabian Thread

"Linda" here is Linda Kasabian, and the track cannot be fully understood without that history.

Kasabian was a member of the Manson Family who was present during the 1969 murders but did not kill anyone herself. She later cooperated with prosecutors and became the star witness at Charles Manson's trial, delivering testimony that proved central to convictions for Manson and several other Family members. In the internal moral code of the Manson Family, she was the definitive snitch, the one person whose decision to speak broke the group's closed, self-protective silence wide open.^[5]

This is not a new obsession for Death Grips. Their 2011 debut mixtape Exmilitary opened with a sample of Charles Manson's voice, establishing from the very beginning of their public career an interest in the Manson Family as a site of American mythology and cult psychology.^[2] Whatever drew them to Manson then, something clearly persisted. Seven years later, with Year of the Snitch, the band returned to that same cast of characters. This time, however, the focus shifted away from the cult leader and toward the woman who ended his power.

"Linda's in Custody" was released as part of an album that arrived June 22, 2018. Linda Kasabian turned 69 years old the day before, on June 21. Whether that timing was deliberate is unconfirmed. With Death Grips, the line between coincidence and design is often impossible to locate, which may be precisely the point.^[1]

Snitching as Ambivalence

The interesting thing about centering Year of the Snitch on Linda Kasabian is that Death Grips do not take an obvious moral position. They do not condemn her. They do not celebrate her. They are drawn to the act of testimony itself: what it means to speak when silence would be safer, what it costs a person to break from a group, and what institutional custody actually does to someone who steps forward.

In the world the Manson Family constructed, loyalty to the group was absolute. Kasabian's testimony was the event that cracked that closed system open, pulling private violence into public accountability. For a band as preoccupied with surveillance, paranoia, and power as Death Grips, the figure of the witness who ends up held by the very institutions she helped is a rich and troubling image. The song's title places her "in custody," which is legally precise (she was held as a material witness, though ultimately granted immunity), but it resonates beyond the legal fact.^[5] Testimony did not free her. It placed her more firmly inside the machinery of the state.

This is the album's central paradox, turned over in track after track. Speaking out is supposed to mean liberation, but the snitch ends up in custody too. Power does not reward honesty; it absorbs it and uses it as its own.

Sound and Self-Reference

The Young Folks described "Linda's in Custody" as one of the album's "weirdest and most abstract moments," grouping it alongside tracks like "Hahaha" and "The Fear" as deep-album material that resists easy entry even by Death Grips standards.^[3] This is not where the record is trying to pull you in. It is where the record is trying to hold you still and make you uncomfortable.

What makes the track structurally unusual is the self-cannibalization at its core. The track draws material from Death Grips' own earlier work, sampling "You Might Think He Loves You for Your Money but I Know What He Really Loves You," a piece from their 2012 album No Love Deep Web.^[4] DJ Swamp's turntable work throughout Year of the Snitch involved exactly this kind of backward-looking approach, fragmenting the band's own catalog and rewiring it into new shapes with different emotional charges.

The self-sample creates a structural loop that mirrors the song's subject. Kasabian's testimony was itself a kind of self-implication: a recounting of events she had participated in, experiences she was forced to reassemble in public under oath. The track performs this doubling formally, with past material held inside the present, earlier work folded into a new shape that does not quite resolve. History does not disappear; it gets sampled.

American Mythology and the Manson Revival

The Manson Family occupies a strange and persistent place in American cultural memory. By 2018, nearly fifty years had passed since the murders, and that approaching anniversary was generating a fresh wave of cultural reassessment. Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood arrived the following summer, as did multiple books and documentary projects revisiting the trial and its legacy. The Manson mythology, which had never quite receded from popular consciousness, was coming back into sharp focus.

Death Grips were working in this cultural moment, though their interest predated the revival by years. What they contribute through Year of the Snitch generally, and "Linda's in Custody" specifically, is a refusal to romanticize the material. There is no gothic glamour here, no nostalgic California mythology. The track is clinical where it is not chaotic. It is interested in legal status, in institutional machinery, in what happens after the testimony is given and the cameras are gone.^[1]

That shift, from Manson as dark anti-hero to Kasabian as institutional prisoner, is where the track does its most original cultural work. The default lens for Manson-adjacent content centers the charismatic male leader. Death Grips point the camera somewhere else entirely.

Alternative Interpretations

Not all listeners arrive at the Kasabian reading. Some approach "Linda's in Custody" as a broader statement about the individual caught within systems of power, surveillance, and institutional constraint. In this reading, "Linda" functions as a placeholder for anyone held by forces they cannot control, any person defined by their relationship to custody rather than by their own choices.

This interpretation lacks the historical precision of the Kasabian connection, but it is not incompatible with it. The specific case and the abstract theme coexist without contradiction. Kasabian's story is also a story about institutional absorption, about a person whose individual act of speaking became property of a larger machine. The personal and the allegorical are the same event, viewed from different distances.

Some listeners, pushing the self-referential aspect further, hear "Linda" as a figure for the band's own earlier work, placed in custody inside the new record, restrained and transformed by time and the act of revisitation. This is speculative, but Death Grips have always rewarded speculative listening more than literal reading. The band's practice of deliberate obscurity, of releasing albums with no press tours and no explanatory interviews, is itself a kind of enforcement: the listener is put in custody with the material and left to work it out.

Conclusion

"Linda's in Custody" works because it refuses to resolve the tension it introduces. It names a person, states a legal condition, and builds a sonic environment that is fragmentary, recursive, and purposefully unstable. It reaches into real American history, backward into the band's own catalog, and produces something that is simultaneously a historical reference, a thematic argument, and a self-portrait.

In the context of Year of the Snitch, it is the track that makes the album's central question most concrete. Snitching, in the Manson Family's internal code, was the one unforgivable act. Linda Kasabian did it anyway. Death Grips are not particularly interested in whether she was right to do it.

They are interested in what it cost, and what the institutions that accepted her testimony did with her afterward. The answer the track implies, without stating it plainly, is that custody is custody regardless of which side of the institutional wall you end up on. The snitch and the criminal occupy the same system. The only difference is the paperwork.