Takyon (Death Yon)

Something arrives before you can orient yourself. The first seconds of "Takyon (Death Yon)" do not introduce a song -- they announce a collision. By the time the drums fully land and MC Ride's voice enters, the track has already established its terms: there is a force here that does not slow down, and it is aimed at you.

The word "tachyon" comes from particle physics. A tachyon is a hypothetical particle that, if it exists, would always travel faster than the speed of light -- not accelerating to that speed, but permanently beyond it, incapable of decelerating into anything observable in ordinary time. Death Grips' deliberate misspelling strips the concept of its clinical distance and makes it physical, immediate. The band confirmed the reference directly, describing the particle in the song as "a metaphor representing the sensation of either becoming that particle or harnessing its energy."^[5]

The subtitle "(Death Yon)" adds another dimension. "Yon" is an archaic word for "over there" or "beyond." The tachyon here is not merely fast -- it is aimed at something past the visible horizon. Speed in this song is inseparable from obliteration.

Sacramento, Winter 2010

Death Grips came together with almost violent speed. The group officially formed on December 21, 2010, when Stefan Burnett (MC Ride), who was living next door to Zach Hill in Sacramento, was recruited by Hill for a new project.^[1] Their first recording was made that same day. By March 2011, a self-titled EP had appeared, and by April 25, 2011, the full mixtape Exmilitary was available as a free download through the Grindcore Karaoke netlabel.^[2]

"Takyon (Death Yon)" appeared first on the Death Grips EP, making it among the very first recordings the group ever released.^[4] The band that would spend the next decade antagonizing record labels, canceling tours, and leaking their own work announced its existence through a song about a particle that cannot be stopped or contained.

The three members brought sharply different backgrounds to the project. Hill was a decade-deep veteran of experimental music, having cofounded the math rock duo Hella and released two solo records that demonstrated his approach to drumming as a form of controlled destruction.^[1] Andy Morin ran a Sacramento recording studio and had worked with Hill on earlier experimental projects. Stefan Burnett had studied visual art at Hampton University before dropping out, returning to Sacramento to work service industry jobs while painting and making music under the name Mxlplx in a short-lived earlier rap trio.^[3] The urgency that defines "Takyon" is partly the urgency of people who had been building toward something for years and were done waiting.

The Physics of Aggression

Death Grips made clear that "Takyon" was built around the sensation of becoming the particle, not merely describing it.^[5] This distinction matters. MC Ride's delivery throughout the track is not that of a narrator observing a phenomenon from outside -- it is the voice of something already in motion, something that has already left its point of origin behind. The imagery in the song describes forces that penetrate all barriers: bone, flesh, social boundary, gravity. The subatomic register of this language is deliberate. The violence here operates below any level that can be defended against.

This kind of physics-inflected aggression had specific roots in Sacramento. The band consistently framed their city as a place of managed confinement -- a state capital characterized by surveillance, bureaucracy, and the grinding weight of economic marginalization. A tachyon is the antithesis of all that. It cannot be slowed, contained, or observed without breaking the laws that govern ordinary existence. The song's central metaphor is, at its root, a refusal of limitation. The particle does not negotiate. It passes through.

The track also participates in a longer tradition of using scientific language as a vehicle for transcendence. What the tachyon offers is not just speed but a kind of existence outside observable time -- an escape from the conditions of the world as it is. For a band emerging from Sacramento's working-class margins, that escape was not merely rhetorical.

A Sample of Everything at Once

The track's production assembles an unlikely set of sources into something that feels inevitable. At its core is a sample from "Supertouch/Shitfit" by Bad Brains, the Washington, D.C. hardcore band who were themselves a deliberate anomaly: a Black punk quartet who merged hardcore aggression with the rhythms of reggae, and who spent their career defying every category their contemporaries tried to impose on them.^[6] Using Bad Brains as a foundation is not only a sonic choice -- it is a genealogical declaration. Death Grips are announcing their lineage in a tradition of Black artists who refused the walls their genres were supposed to have.

Alongside the Bad Brains source, the track incorporates material from Jamaican dancehall deejay Cutty Ranks, adding a Caribbean vocal tradition built around commanding presence and the assertion of dominance through sheer force of voice.^[6] The Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps marching percussion recording gives the track a militaristic underpinning that ties directly to Exmilitary's title -- the album frames Sacramento as a war zone, and "Takyon" provides the munitions.^[6]

Zach Hill's live drumming interacts with these samples in a way that is neither simple accompaniment nor pure overlay. The drumming sounds, at points, like it is trying to break the track from within. Andy Morin's electronic production layers over all of this, creating a density that should be overwhelming but instead resolves into something with the momentum of inevitability.

The Music Video and the Cultural Moment

The official music video for "Takyon (Death Yon)," released on May 18, 2011, was self-directed by Death Grips themselves.^[7] It became a landmark in underground music video aesthetics -- raw, strobe-heavy, visually confrontational, and reportedly including actual footage of MC Ride entering a building without permission. The production budget appeared to be essentially zero, and the result felt more authentic for it. At a moment when hip-hop videos were still largely defined by aspirational imagery and polish, the "Takyon" video proposed the opposite: degraded, chaotic, barely documentable footage of something real happening at the edges of the world.

Exmilitary received widespread critical acclaim despite its aggressive inaccessibility. Drowned in Sound awarded it 9 out of 10, describing the record as "largely unprecedented" and the production as "pumped up, ruinous, and hi-tech."^[8] Consequence named it a "heavy-hitting contender for rap album of 2011," contrasting it favorably against more polished contemporaries as an authentically uncompromising work.^[9] It carried a Metacritic aggregate score of 82 -- a remarkable figure for a free download distributed through a netlabel.^[2]

"Takyon" became the track most frequently cited by listeners trying to explain what Death Grips was to the uninitiated. Its combination of an accessible conceptual frame -- a physics metaphor anyone could look up -- and a completely inaccessible sonic experience made it uniquely useful as an introduction. You could explain what the song was about. What it sounded like was something else entirely.

Multiple Readings

Some listeners have read "Takyon" primarily as a drug narrative. The physical language throughout the song -- the imagery of penetration, the subatomic register, the sense of operating beyond the body's ordinary limits -- lends itself to an interpretation centered on stimulant experience. The band's own stated framework is the physics metaphor, but neither reading excludes the other. The sensation of becoming a tachyon and the sensation of certain chemical states are not entirely different things to describe.

A second reading emphasizes the anti-institutional dimension. In this frame, the tachyon is a stand-in for any force that refuses to be observed, cataloged, slowed, or administered by systems designed to contain it. The song is less about physics than about what it means to move through structures built to stop you -- and to pass through them anyway. Given the band's subsequent career, in which they consistently antagonized industry structures and defied conventional expectations,^[1] this interpretation has accumulated considerable biographical weight.

A third strand focuses on performance itself. Hill's drumming on this track is physically extreme -- he plays with the intensity of someone dismantling an instrument, not playing one. MC Ride's delivery sounds like it is approaching the edges of what the voice can sustain. Some listeners hear the song as being, at its most fundamental level, about what it is to commit completely to a performance -- the total surrender of the body to a moment of controlled detonation. The music video, with its strobe effects and raw physicality, supports this reading.^[10]

These readings are not mutually exclusive. The power of "Takyon (Death Yon)" is that its central metaphor is capacious enough to hold all of them simultaneously. The tachyon is a physics concept, a chemical experience, a refusal of institutional control, and a description of what it is to be fully inside a performance. The song does not resolve these into a single answer. It moves too fast for the resolution to matter.

Death Grips would go on to sign with Epic Records, leak their own album when the label delayed it, get dropped, reunite, disappear, and return more than once over the decade following Exmilitary's release.^[1] Through all of it, "Takyon (Death Yon)" remained a reliable point of first contact for new listeners -- the track that demonstrated, in under four minutes, what the group was doing and why conventional music criticism could not quite contain it.

The tachyon never slows down. That is always the point. The particle that passes through everything, that exists only in perpetual velocity beyond the speed of light, that cannot be observed without breaking the rules of the universe -- that is what Death Grips proposed as a model for music and for life on "Takyon (Death Yon)." This is not a song about physics. It is a declaration that speed itself is a form of freedom, and that some forces do not ask permission to pass through.