The Money Store

This album will feel like an assault the first time you play it. That is not a warning. That is the point, and it is also what makes it one of the most genuinely exciting things to happen in music in the last twenty years.

Death Grips are three people from Sacramento: MC Ride, who raps with the controlled fury of someone who has been awake for seventy-two hours and has something important to say; Zach Hill, a drummer with a background in math rock who plays with the technical precision of a jazz musician and the physicality of someone trying to destroy the kit; and Andy Morin, who builds the production out of jagged synthesizer loops, industrial noise, and chopped electronic samples that sound like machines learning how to panic. The Money Store was their major label debut on Epic Records, which is a fact that still feels impossible given what it sounds like.

Opener "Get Got" starts quietly, almost deceptively, before the record accelerates into "The Fever," which hits like a wall. "I've Seen Footage" and "Hustle Bones" are as close as the album gets to a conventional hook, and they are still more abrasive than most artists' most aggressive moments. What keeps it from being simply noise is the craft underneath. The beats are built with mathematical precision, Hill's drumming locks into the electronic framework with meticulous accuracy, and Ride's delivery is always rapping, always on rhythm, always purposeful even at its most ferocious. The Money Store sounds like the internet feeling, like digital anxiety made into music, like punk rock discovered hip-hop and they both got angrier in the process. Nobody sounds like this. No one has figured out how to.