The Horn Section

There are no horns in "The Horn Section." Not a trumpet, not a trombone, not even a distant approximation of brass. This is not an oversight. It is the entire point.

Death Grips have built their entire career on the gap between expectation and delivery, between the name of a thing and what the thing actually does. Track five of their 2018 album Year of the Snitch runs for one minute and thirty-two seconds. It announces itself with a single barked vocal command, then hands the wheel entirely to Zach Hill and turntablist DJ Swamp. What follows is a percussive argument in miniature: dense, purposeful, and over before you fully register it has begun.^[1]

A Band at Its Own Crossroads

By 2018, Death Grips occupied a position that would have seemed unlikely to anyone who witnessed their early, self-immolating career trajectory. They had formed in Sacramento in 2010, signed to and deliberately sabotaged a major label deal, announced a break-up in 2014, then quietly resumed operations within months.^[6] The band had become, paradoxically, an institution: a cult act whose very alienness had made them beloved, whose deliberate difficulty had attracted exactly the devoted audience it seemed designed to repel.

The sessions for Year of the Snitch at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles brought together an unusual cast: Justin Chancellor, the bassist for Tool; Lucas Abela, the Australian noise artist; Andrew Adamson, the New Zealand film director known for the Shrek films; and DJ Swamp, a turntablist who ended up contributing to the majority of the album's tracks.^[1] The variety of collaborators signaled a band in an expansive mood, interested in friction and collision as much as refinement.

The album's title reaches in several directions at once. The word "snitch" invokes surveillance culture and the era of data harvesting that had crystallized into public scandal. It also alludes to Linda Kasabian, the Manson Family member who testified against her fellow members in the Tate-LaBianca murder trials, becoming that group's archetypal betrayer.^[1] For Death Grips, both meanings resonate: the album interrogates who gets snitched on, who does the snitching, and whether the distinction holds up under scrutiny.

Zach Hill as His Own Horn Section

The track's title carries a specific resonance when you know how Zach Hill has described his own drumming. In interviews, Hill has articulated an approach to percussion that deliberately refuses the drummer's conventional supporting role: he plays, he has said, more like a guitarist or a horn player than a drummer.^[5] The drums do not keep time for the song. They are the song. They cut, they surge, they carry melodic and rhythmic intention simultaneously.

"The Horn Section" makes this philosophy explicit through naming. By calling a drumming showcase after the instrument it doesn't contain, the track points to what Hill's percussion actually does: it occupies the tonal, expressive space that horns would fill in another arrangement. In a jazz or soul context, the horn section cuts through the texture, brings urgency, announces itself with force. Hill does this with sticks and cymbals.

Post-Trash, reviewing the album, identified this track as evidence of a more deliberate drumming approach on the record, noting Hill's playing as one of its standout qualities.^[3] The Edge (University of Southampton) reached for biological metaphor to capture the track's texture, describing it as sounding like the album played in reverse at double speed through a speaker constructed from rubber and bone marrow.^[2] The description may sound hyperbolic, but it captures something genuine: the track is dense and disorienting in a way that feels almost physical.

The Function of Brevity

At ninety-two seconds, "The Horn Section" demands a different kind of attention than a conventional song. It is closer in format to a hardcore punk track: arrive, devastate, depart. There is no verse-chorus structure to follow, no narrative arc to trace. The track opens with a short vocal utterance that functions less as a lyric than as a starter pistol, and then the drums and turntables take over entirely.

This compression is a choice, not a limitation. Death Grips have always used short tracks to execute specific tonal functions within an album's larger shape. They are not filler; they are recalibrations. "The Horn Section" sits at track five of a sixteen-track record, arriving just as the listener might be settling into Year of the Snitch's rhythms. Its purpose is to shake that comfort loose before it solidifies.

DJ Swamp's turntable work is crucial to the track's texture. Swamp, whose real name is Ronald K. Keys, built his reputation as a battle DJ and has spoken about turntablism as an instrument in its own right rather than a technique. Here, his contributions blur into Hill's percussion in ways that make the two elements difficult to separate. The track functions as a dialogue between two performers who share a common language: controlled chaos, rhythmic aggression, the pleasure of density.^[1]

Surveillance, Noise, and the Act of Witnessing

Placed within the album's broader argument about surveillance and complicity, "The Horn Section" takes on additional meaning. The record as a whole asks: who watches, who reports, who is watched? The Cambridge Analytica scandal that broke months before the album's release made vivid the ways in which ordinary people had become data sources, their behavior harvested and sold. The "snitch," in this reading, is everyone: every person who had ever clicked agree on a terms-of-service agreement without reading it.^[7]

In this context, a track that strips away almost everything except percussion and turntable noise reads as a kind of evidence reduction: all the language, all the signal, pared back to pure sound. You cannot surveil rhythm. You cannot data-mine a drum fill. The track's near-instrumentalism becomes, in this reading, a small act of resistance, or at least of opacity.

The album received strong critical attention upon release. The Young Folks awarded it a 9/10 and described it as "a whole new chapter for Death Grips," citing its incorporation of krautrock, progressive rock, and jazz elements.^[8] Rolling Stone framed it as a "cyber-noise-punk-rap disruption," a label that captures its genre-refusing character.^[7] Even more skeptical assessments, such as Spectrum Pulse's 7/10, acknowledged Hill's drumwork as a genuine highlight.^[4]

Alternative Readings

Some listeners have read "The Horn Section" more literally, as a joke at the listener's expense. You show up expecting brass. There is no brass. The band finds this funny, and possibly you should too. Death Grips have always carried a vein of absurdist humor through even their most intense work, and the willingness to name something after what it conspicuously is not fits that tradition.

Others frame it as a straightforward assertion of identity: Zach Hill's percussion is his horn section, and the title is less ironic than declarative. From this angle, the track is not undermining expectations but announcing a substitution. This is our horn section. It just doesn't sound like what you think a horn section sounds like.

Both readings can coexist. Death Grips are not a band that traffics in single, cleanly intended meanings.

Why It Lingers

The strange achievement of "The Horn Section" is that a track of under two minutes, with minimal vocals and no conventional song structure, manages to feel consequential. This is partly because of the players involved: Hill and Swamp are both exceptional at what they do, and the track is a showcase for both. But it is also because Death Grips have spent their entire career teaching listeners to take short, aggressive gestures seriously.

Noise and aggression are only interesting when they mean something. The history of experimental music is filled with loud, difficult records that failed because the difficulty was the entire point. Death Grips avoid this trap by embedding their chaos in concepts: surveillance, paranoia, identity, the question of who is watching and who is performing. "The Horn Section," in its brief, ferocious duration, participates in all of these conversations without making them explicit.

It is ninety-two seconds that say: we are the horn section. We always were. You just had to listen in the right way.