Death Grips - Hot Head

Surprise! Despite announcing details of their imminent dissolution on a measly napkin back in mid-2014, this year has brought further proof that infamous rap trolls Death Grips are still very much in the noise-making game. Not that they really had us fooled. With supposed farewell album ‘The Powers That B’ in the can by early 2015, it was obvious that they, a band that had previously committed career suicide by leaking their own album ahead of its major label release, were never really going to go gently into the night. It was something ironically easy to predict from a band so famed for their unpredictability. Confirming these suspicions, new release ‘Hot Head’ is a brutal proclamation of the group’s continued existence - a cruel told-you-so aimed at those innocent enough to buy into their claims of calling it a day. What’s even less of a shock is that it’s a nausea-inducing, nerve-shredding racket instantly worthy of a place in their anarchic back catalogue. Death Grips 2.0 are still very much refusing to exercise restraint. Not that there was any danger that they were going to drop a neatly-packaged pop gem. As a band that traffic in the barely-listenable, such frightening, limitless environments are par for the course at this point. Not even a disorientating hint at Giorgio Moroder’s crystal-synth genius is enough to shake ‘Hot Head’’s overwhelming aura of impending doom. It’s as uncompromising as we’ve come to expect from the shock rap trio, a breakneck collision of apocalyptic beats, violently-delivered rap verse and rusty, chainsaw-like whirrs made from the stuff of nightmares. Whether or not you want to call it a return is beside the point, ‘Hot Head’ is the devilish next step into the group’s ensnaring and hostile world. You better hope you can find an escape route.