How clipping. Hacked Life’s Glitching Contradictions

It’s 2025, which means we are officially a decade beyond the future famously predicted in Back to the Future Part II, which took place primarily in the magical, distant tomorrow of 2015. While we might not have self-tying shoelaces or X-ray vision yet, other features of the film weren’t terribly far off: drones, biometric security, hoverboards (kind of) and video calls all certainly exist now. But that doesn’t mean our future actually feels like the one depicted in the 1989 blockbuster. Our drones are used not for dog-walking but warfare, any “safety” provided by our biometric security measures may come at the cost of privacy and even civil rights, our hoverboards don’t actually “hover” so much as regularly (and sometimes lethally) burst into flames and our video calls… Well.

“Shit, I think he’s muted,” clipping. frontman Daveed Diggs says, peering at the screen. Bandmate Jonathan Snipes follows up with some sort of verbal affirmation, albeit one I can’t confidently make out from my side of our Zoom call, what with his stream glitching out constantly due to my subpar Wi-Fi. William (Bill) Hutson, the final member of the experimental rap trio, is completely silent, mouthing something unintelligible as we watch the little red mute button appear then disappear over and over again as he tries to fix his audio. Diggs continues to coach Hutson through the technological hell that is a conference call interview: “Well, now it says you’re muted. Oh, now you’re not. We still can’t hear you, though.”

Snipes sighs out a short laugh then says, with the dry air of a long-suffering artist in the midst of a virtual press cycle, “Honestly, it never stops being funny that every meeting and every interview we have to talk about our album—our album about a broken, imperfect, fucked-up techno-dystopia—ends up just being us frustratedly troubleshooting some broken piece of technology.”

The fact that our Zoom call so perfectly exemplifies the very tension at the heart of clipping.’s fifth studio record, the cyberpunk opus Dead Channel Sky, is less a bizarre instance of ironic serendipity than it is an entirely anticipated occupational hazard—but that, too, feels more apt than anything else. Once-futuristic technology permeates every nook and cranny of the once-future that we now call our present, but more often than not, these augmentations can feel tedious and frustratingly clunky at best (see: those self-flushing toilets that only ever flush when you don’t want them to, not to mention Zoom calls) and downright harmful at worst (see: the reported decrease in human intelligence believed to result from widespread smartphone addiction, not to mention drone strikes and hoverboard explosions and corporate tracking of biometric information).

Hutson, thankfully now freed from Zoom jail, voices a similar sentiment: “Even though we still think of those novels as science fiction, the cyberpunks did predict a lot of things that we do have now that seemed really futuristic in the fiction of the ‘80s. But to us now, [everything] seems not only oppressive and miserable but also just…boring and everyday. And they kind of don’t work, too—I mean, look at what we’re doing right now! [Video calls] were thought to be some giant science-fictional leap in the early ’90s when people saw them in Back to the Future Part II, and now it’s just this boring thing we have to sit on for work all day.”

The tonal discrepancy between the seductive aesthetics of cyberpunk techno-dystopia and the grimy, bureaucratic actuality of it is one of the driving forces of Dead Channel Sky, which recontextualizes our reality through the lens of ‘80s/‘90s cyberslang (and vice-versa). Cyberpunks imagined a world that, despite still sharing the societal ills of the then-present, had been radically changed—and even made unrecognizable—by technology. (“Dystopian, but, like, badass dystopian,” Diggs jokes). Fear was very much present in the cyberpunk literature that proliferated towards the end of the twenty-first century, but it was outsized, made larger-than-life. No fictional depiction of techno-fascism could ever predict just how banal and mundane it would end up feeling in practice.

Enter clipping. with Dead Channel Sky. Contrary to the futuristic imaginings of past cyberpunk literature, “[t]his album takes place in 2025. It takes place right now, but in a sort of alternate present, a parallel universe that was extrapolated out of the cyberpunk novels—and it looks almost like ours,” Hutson says.

Dead Channel Sky is clipping.’s first record since 2020’s Visions of Bodies Being Burned (the second of their back-to-back horror records), and while that wait has framed public perception of the record as a long-burning project clipping. has been meaning to do for years and years now, the reality is a little different. “Strangely, this one came up a lot more by accident than the other ones,” Huston says. “This was not something we’d always intended to do. And yet, now, it feels so bizarre that it came about more by accident, because it feels so us to me. Like, of course, we should have been doing this the whole time.”

The notion of a cyberpunk album first cropped up in 2018, after the song “Run It” (now on Dead Channel Sky) was made for “a specific cyberpunk-related property that it ended up not getting used for,” Hutson explains. “And we just liked the song! We’ve done that a bunch—where we have a song made basically during another project that we like but doesn’t quite fit, so we end up deciding to put it aside and create a whole new thing around it instead. And we liked “Run It” so much that we started to talk about, like, what would a whole album of this sound be like?” Originally, the album wasn’t even officially considered “cyberpunk”; the closest anyone got to naming the sound was when Snipes named their Dropbox demo folder “Hakker Techno.”

And on March 14th, 2025, some seven odd years later, a very updated take on that “Hakker Techno” folder was finally released to the public, under the name Dead Channel Sky (inspired by the first line of William Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk text Neuromancer). A sprawling, 20-track epic that lays the myriad futures of the cyberpunk heyday of the past atop our own present moment, Dead Channel Sky hums with a deep, bone-weary understanding of techno-dystopia without forgoing that sleek, neon-lit cyberpunk feeling we all know and love. That overwhelming “coolness” still exists in spades, but clipping. manage to imbue it with the specific brand of technology-induced, mundane-yet-existential dread we’ve become all too familiar with.

Part of the reason for the record’s present-moment orientation, Snipes explains, was that the trio felt grounding the record in the modern day would help to avoid any feelings of ridiculousness at the premise itself. “There’s something that always feels a little bit jokey about the sci-fi movies of our childhood—things like Escape from New York or Terminator 2 or Blade Runner. As we approach these actual dates that felt so distant and so far away, it all just starts to feel so silly,” he says. “I remember going to see a screening of that movie, The Apple, which was set in the ‘distant future’ of 1992. It was made in the 1980s. It’s ridiculous! So, I think the way to make [a science fiction work] not feel like a bizarre attempt to be predictive, not feel like a joke, is to actually set it right now, in the present.”

Similarly, rather than fixate on one specific science-fictional vision, Dead Channel Sky operates as though all of the visions are happening at once, stitched together into a sonic collage that’s less about prediction and more about perception. Although, to be fair, the idea for this structure did somewhat stem from one specific work of cyberpunk literature: “There was this early [William] Gibson short story called The Gernsback Continuum from the collection Mirror Shades,” Hutson continues. “It takes place in the early ‘80s, and it’s about this future that didn’t end up happening, the future that was imagined in the ‘50s—atomic age, future sci-fi stuff—overlaid on top of the present in a way that you could still somehow access. It’s sort of mournful about this weird atomic-age future that didn’t happen in ‘reality,’ but still exists out there because it was imagined in that ‘40s, ‘50s sci-fi.”

That layering approach is an obvious inspiration for the construction of Dead Channel Sky, which sees each individual purported “future” bleed into every other one (including our “real” reality). It makes me think, weirdly, of a thin-papered stack of gravestone rubbings, as old-fashioned as that “technology” might be. In attempting to accurately render the contours and textures of these futures never lived, the graphite you’d use to etch each headstone impression on paper would inevitably end up smeared on the pages around it. If the stack was held up to the light, the resulting impression might be a single semi-indecipherable headstone. In other words: the amalgamation of the details and textures of all these dead futures put together is a single reality that does not “exist,” despite being created solely from ones that once did.
As a result, Dead Channel Sky feels beamed in from a timeline where every imagined outcome from the last forty years all coexist with each other, all overlapping, contradicting, and glitching in real time; the world’s most discomforting palimpsest.

This merging of past, present and future is not limited to the album’s lyrical content, either: “We’re trying to draw this parallel between hip hop and cyberpunk as two forms of hacking, two forms of layering technology, of using technology incorrectly to make your art,” Hutson explains, “to somehow find individuality and art in these effectively corporate mass-produced products, like turntables or pieces of software, and use them to legitimately express yourself.”

At least based on the five studio albums clipping. has released thus far, it seems the trio has yet to meet a narrative or concept—be it an afro-futurist space opera (Splendor & Misery), a double-headed horrorcore anthology (There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Visions of Bodies Being Burned), or a mixtape-style cyberpunk opus—they haven’t been able to somehow wrangle into visceral sonic form. Even aside from Hutson and Snipes’ evident talent for storytelling via experimental production, cyberpunk itself is thoroughly intertwined with the kind of music clipping. has always made, and its members have always listened to. As Roy Christopher, who wrote an entire book about the connections between cyberpunk and hip-hop (Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future), explains in the album’s official description, “hip-hop and cyberpunk…both rose in the 1970s and warmed the wider world during the 1980s and 1990s. What if someone explicitly merged them into one set and sound? After all, both movements are the result of hacking the haunted leftovers of a war-torn culture that’s long since moved on.”

It’s not just the conjoined histories of these parallel movements that makes a rap mixtape so uniquely fitting for a cyberpunk collage like Dead Channel Sky; it’s also the nature of the medium itself. “Music is really good at this [remixing of the past]—the technology of the things that made the sounds back in the ‘80s and ‘90s all still exist,” Diggs says. “You can make things that sound exactly like they did then.”

And in many ways, that’s exactly what the group did. Hutson describes Dead Channel Sky as a kind of curated time machine, one that mimics the layered chaos of early hip-hop’s cut-and-paste construction. “Any time you’re listening to recorded music, you’re listening to the past, to things that took place in the past,” he says. “The history of hip-hop and electronic music is all about smashing together time periods. This is true for sampling especially, but also for pretty much all electronic music, all tech-based beats—these recorded sounds aren’t the result of live music being played with physical acoustic instruments by human fingers in front of you. It is layers and layers of past sounds, right? Different times, different eras, all smashed together, all in one sonic space.”

That idea—of sound as a kind of time travel, and of technology as a means of hacking into that sound—became a guiding principle for the album. Hutson describes it as “a collage of different time periods and different eras,” one that doesn’t just blur the lines between them, but forces them to coexist alongside each other, creating friction. “We didn’t want it all to blend together until none of it meant anything in particular,” he says. “We wanted to get those classic rave sounds, those samples that you recognize from the ‘90s. But we also wanted to emulate the way early hip-hop was particularly chaotic in its collage form.”

Unlike Splendor & Misery, which told a singular, focused narrative, or the horror records, which operated like self-contained short stories, Dead Channel Sky exists somewhere in between. It’s not a concept album in the traditional sense, but it’s not just a loose collection of songs, either. Instead, it feels more like a curated compilation from a parallel dimension—a mixtape from a future that never happened. “All of these things take place in the same world. All of these “artists” have probably heard of each other, or know each other, or whatever,” Diggs explains. “The idea of this album is that these are all different artists who just sort of happen to have my voice.”

And in further contrast to most previous clipping. records, Diggs’ voice varies greatly from track to track on Dead Channel Sky, often abandoning his signature even-keeled flow for a gravelly growl or a hushed undertone. “There’s a lot more timbral variety vocally on this album—we let ourselves stretch out. Part of it is that we’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’ve removed the self from it in so many ways, and initially, that less emotive delivery felt like part of what clipping. was about, but it’s just become less about that over time,” Diggs explains. “This has become the major musical output for all of us, as opposed to a side project, and so it has to hold all of the other shit I want to do too, because I’m not making other rap songs! And since the album is like a mixtape, including more vocal variety lent itself to it really well.”

The exact term for what kind of album Dead Channel Sky is seems to be up for contention, a little bit—not because the trio disagrees with each other, but because they simply don’t know if there’s really a word for it. “Mixtape,” like Diggs said, is used the most, although Hutson expands on that further, saying it’s “like a compilation CD from the late ‘90s that had Orbital and Fatboy Slim and The Prodigy and Roni Size and Acid Attack on the same thing.” But it’s Snipes who eventually seems to hit the nail on the head, his background in film scoring put to good use: “I mean, it’s kind of the Blade soundtrack.” Diggs and Hutson both immediately burst into laughter before vehemently agreeing. (Important clarification: Snipes is strictly referring to the soundtrack for the original Blade, not its sequel, which he says is a collection of weird mashups that are “mostly unsuccessful.” The Blade soundtrack, on the other hand, is “basically a compilation rap record, except for that one New Order remix.”)

“There’s a little bit of revisionism, too, in thinking of this as, like, a big-box compilation soundtrack album from the ‘90s,” Snipes adds. “There were a lot of people making music in a lot of genres at that time that I found out about later—people that weren’t represented on some of those soundtracks, right? And so it’s like, ‘Wait, who would I have put on The Matrix soundtrack? Why couldn’t Pan Sonic have had a track in The Matrix? What would Accufen’s track on The Saint’s soundtrack be like?”

In other words, it’s not just about sounding like the past—especially considering that most current music is preoccupied with doing exactly that. (“The newest, most cutting-edge music these days doesn’t sound like the future anymore, nor is it trying to,” Hutson says, offering up SOPHIE circa 2018 as “the most futuristic music made to date.” It’s not a surprise that we’re falling back on the past, though; “I think when the world is really shitty, we tend to lean into the comfort of nostalgia a little bit.”) Instead, it’s about thinking like the past, adopting the sensibilities of a bygone era and transplanting them into their future—our present.

Unfortunately, though, mimicking earlier approaches to album creation is not always feasible. There are some constraints in the present that make certain aspects of older production virtually impossible. “Part of the problem with the [music] world now is that you can’t legally make an album like Paul’s Boutique, or any Public Enemy album, due to licensing issues,” Hutson laments. “You couldn’t really sample more than two things per song even if you had the money to because you have to license, like, 50% of the publishing of that song for each sample, and there’s only 100% of the publishing in the first place—there isn’t enough of that pie to give away!”

So rather than filling Dead Channel Sky with dozens of samples, clipping. made each one count. There are only two samples on the album: an iconic line from Human Resource’s 1991 rave hit “Dominator” (featured on the fittingly-titled “Dominator”) and excerpts from The Last Angel of History, a 1996 Afrofuturist documentary (“Code”). “Dominator,” which more or less opens the album (following clipping.’s signature “Intro” track), is an instant earworm, in large part due to Snipes and Hutson’s insane sample manipulation—it’s like a club-friendly, rave-ready take on the title track from clipping.’s 2016 EP Wriggle, which takes the cutting and slicing of the sample in “Dominator” to an even higher extreme, turning the sample itself into the beat. But as it turns out, the Human Resource track wasn’t even the original skeleton for the track—far from it. “The real story is we made that beat with another sample that we couldn’t get, so then we tried about a dozen different things to find something that worked as well or better,” Snipes admits of “Dominator.” “And while I’m not sure that rhythmically or aesthetically ‘Dominator’ works better than the original choice, it’s a lot better conceptually for me. It’s a much cooler reference for that track.”

“In America, unless you’re a raver, it’s not a big song,” Hutson adds. “But if you’re Belgian or Dutch, it’s like… that’s Thriller.” Snipes can’t help but laugh out loud as he reiterates how “fucking hilarious [it is] that we sampled it.” (There is one drawback, though: “There are certain European friends of ours who we might have to field a bunch of text messages from when the album comes out,” Hutson grins. “Like, ‘What the fuuuuck?!?!’”) The song goes beyond the joke, though; the way clipping. repurposes the sample turns it into something harder, darker, more aggressive—a relentless cyber-driven antithesis to ego death in addition to a peak-time warehouse anthem. “Code” wasn’t built around its sample, either; in fact, Diggs’ original idea for the track had little to do with the documentary excerpts now placed throughout the song. “I wanted to get people that we knew from various different regions all over the world to send us messages using the most local slang they could muster, and then we’d have Baseck or somebody scratch together really intricate DJ-premier style cuts for the thing,” he says. “But that was a lot of legwork that didn’t get done…uh, well, by me!”

The Last Angel of History—specifically, its fictional framing narrative, which saw a future archaeologist digging through the footage as if for a historical dig—had been on Snipe’s radar for some time as a possible sample, but it wasn’t until partway through “Code”’s creation that he knew it was the right fit: “I had been playing around with the idea of this sample for ‘Code’ for a while, but then we discovered that it literally talks about ‘the code’ in the text, and we were, like, well, this is just too serendipitous not to use.”

While “Dominator” and “Code” are the only two songs on the album to technically feature samples, there are at least a half-dozen others that might trick you into thinking otherwise—and that was very much intentional. As part of combatting the sampling issues inherent in attempting to make a ‘90s mixtape style record in 2025, Snipes and Hutson sought, in the latter’s words, “to use all of our sounds in a way that felt evocative of sampling, or at least of the layered chaos and multiple time references that we hoped to achieve.” Guest features (ranging from Aesop Rock to Cartel Madras to Wilco guitarist Nels Cline) also helped to add to the multitudinous feeling of the record, as did clipping.’s dedication to covering all their late-20th century musical bases.

“We were trying to check boxes to make sure we had all the necessary types of tracks, and at some point we realized we didn’t really have a four-on-the-floor French house banger,” Hutson recalls. If you’ve heard the album and have even just a passing familiarity with European rave music, it should come as no surprise that this realization resulted in “Mirrorshades Pt. 2,” a number late in the record that arguably sounds less like other clipping. songs than anything else on the record. More than anything else, it just sounds French. (“It’s incredibly French,” Hutson confirms. Snipes doesn’t miss a beat, either: “It is very, very, very French.”).

The unofficial mental checklist for Dead Channel Sky was longer, even, than a list of crucial genres or sounds to include; there was an overwhelming amount of ideas and concepts clipping. hoped to fit in the record, which is probably why it ended up sitting pretty at 20 songs. (At one point, I ask how they decide when an album is officially done. Hutson answers for the group: “When it’s been more than five years and it’s already too long…then we need three more songs”).

It’s never easy for artists to reach that place of feeling an album has accomplished everything it set out to do, said everything it set out to say, but I can only imagine that grows exponentially harder when the album in question is trying to encompass not only the entirety of a literary and cultural genre, but the past four decades of its relationship to the world it arose from.

“Code,” for instance, doesn’t stop with the Last Angel of History sample; in between the film narrator’s discussion of “data thieves,” Diggs drops references to William Gibson’s Neuromancer that number somewhere in the double-digits. “I asked Bill to just give me a list of cyberslang songs when I was writing that song,” Diggs says. And Hutson obliged: “I flipped through like 20 novels as fast as I could, looking for funny terms.” As it turns out, that’s where mid-record standout “Dodger” originated from—Hutson saw the term (which he says refers to “someone who lives in the meatspace and is off the grid outside of that”) when looking through John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider, and something about it just stuck. “There’s this war in the album, so the person in ‘Dodger’ is kind of both a dodger because they’re not fighting the war but also because they’re not plugged into cyberspace.”

With a title taken straight from the pages of Neuromancer (and many an allusion to Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy littered throughout the record, even beyond “Code”), a song named after a device from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? (“Mood Organ”) and lines from Loyd Blankenship’s 1986 creed “The Hacker Manifesto” bookending the record, Dead Channel Sky is utterly drenched in cyberpunk lore. (“Oftentimes, we might be a little too obscure,” Hutson says, grinning sheepishly. Their album Splendor & Misery, for one, is named after “an unfinished Samuel Delany novel that will never see the light of day.”)

But Dead Channel Sky is also full of the immediately recognizable, with references spanning from Gucci to Google to Guantanamo Bay—and it’s all seamlessly interwoven with the cyberslang that crops up throughout. The Dick-inspired “Mood Organ” is immediately followed by the retrospective “Polaroids,” making listeners pivot from techno-assassins and plasma walls to Billabong logos and acrylic nails. “Mirrorshades Pt. 2” is a song-length homage to the iconic symbol of the cyberpunk genre that Bruce Sterling named his 1986 anthology after, and it also name-drops Minute Maid juice. And nowhere is this blending of realities quite as thorough as the album’s staggering closer, “Ask What Happened,” which provides a run-down of history via a grocery list of things that happened in our world—“and a lot of things that absolutely didn’t,” Hutson laughs. But the speed and fervor with which Diggs spits those real-world critiques (of the Vietnam War, trickle-down economics, the Central Park Five, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign and much more) is so intense that you almost don’t even notice when the references start to lose their grounding in reality.

“That is our song by a very self-serious, pain-in-the-ass, conscious rapper,” Hutson laughs. “But, I mean, we grew up on pain-in-the-ass conscious rappers; like, that’s so much of mine and Daveed’s childhood.” (“Oh, yeah. I have been one at times!” Diggs concurs, grinning.) The character narrating “Ask What Happened,” in Hutson’s view, “definitely curated the record.” The speaker is attempting to summarize what’s going on in the bizarre amalgamation of future realities clipping. created, to draw the lines between the thumb tacks placed on a Charlie Kelly-style conspiracy board. “Really, it’s his compilation,” Diggs says. “He’s trying to connect all the dots, you know?”

In a way, the unnamed narrator of “Ask What Happened” bears some resemblance to the impressively dedicated sleuths populating the .clipping fanbase, found in droves over on r/ItsClippingBitch. When clipping. worked secret messages and codes into the nooks and crannies of Splendor & Misery, the subreddit wasted no time in finding them—or, at least, most of them. (There’s one, Snipes thinks, that has yet to be uncovered, although Hutson adds that it’s absolutely possible someone did end up finding it in the nine years since the record’s release, but if they did, the band hasn’t seen it. After all, it’s not as if they’ve camped out on Reddit, stakeout-style, for the past decade). If there’s one thing clipping. fans love, it’s a hypothetically solvable enigma. And, as a long-time clipping. fan myself, I have put my detective cap on from time to time, too.

I did manage to solve at least one “mystery” during my chat with the band: the song cited in the press release that seemed to be missing from the final record (“Knocking it Back”) was literally just an earlier title for “Scams,” so for any Redditors reading this, there’s no need to rubber bands out for that one. (“We change song titles a lot,” Snipes says. “Like, a lot, a lot—to the point where I can’t keep track of them.”) For instance, 2020’s “Eaten Alive” was apparently first called “Rusty Tool Shed,” and then “got leveled up to Swamp Witch,” Diggs says. So, for what it’s worth, don’t call out song titles at clipping. concerts; according to Diggs, “Somebody has to say the first line, or I’m never going to get there!”)

As for everything else… While I did get to talk to the group about some of Dead Channel Sky’s purported mysteries at length, I am honor-bound against divulging them here—why ruin the fun? And, for what its worth, a cursory search into the r/ItsClippingBitch depths proves that fans don’t need me spilling any secrets; somehow, they’ve already made a great deal of headway on their own (which is the only reason I feel comfortable even mentioning any of this to begin with!). What I can say, however, is this: There are “a lot of secret conceptual links that are alluded to” that Snipes looks forward to people having fun figuring out; There is “an overarching framework to the record,” but Hutson says the group doesn’t plan on discussing it publicly anytime soon (or, as Snipes says, maybe ever); The “codes” used in Splendor & Misery were specific to the concept of that album (for the uninitiated, the narrator is a computer on a spaceship traveling away from Earth that is catching up to radio signal transmissions in real time), so perhaps the “hidden” aspects of this album have less to do with binary and Morse code than ‘90s media and science fiction; and, finally, Diggs confirms that there are “several direct allusions to Splendor & Misery on the record,” and most are “pretty obvious.”

At the same time, though, the band are the first to admit that some of the connections latent beneath Dead Channel Sky’s surface weren’t initially intentional, especially considering how long and stretched-out the process of writing, recording and finalizing records tends to be for them. As Diggs says through a self-deprecating grin, “A lot of these synchronicities that might pop up between songs might just be because of my own misunderstandings of what I might have been talking about a year ago.” But intent itself is kind of beside the point: “Whether or not an artist intends to put something into their work, if people find it there, then it is there. That connection is there now, and that’s what’s important,” Snipes adds. “Oh, what’s that quote? ‘Don’t ask me what I meant, ask me what I made.’ That’s how I always think of it, at least.”

This philosophy of collaboration between artist and listener informs clipping.’s own style, as well; so much of their own work has been focused on drawing connections between genres and mediums that were never intended to be there, but that the band found undeniable. clipping. isn’t telling stories about the future, but remixing stories about our present—hacking them, reassembling them into something new. It’s not just about dystopia; it’s about how we think about dystopia, about the stories we tell ourselves and the ways we process an ever-accelerating world. It’s an album built on contradictions: high-tech and low-life, nostalgia and cynicism, past and future, all collapsing into one glitching, chaotic present—shitty Zoom calls and all.

“With this album, we also wanted to draw connections between ‘kinds’ of music that are much more separated now than they were originally. Like, in the ‘80s, hip-hop just wasn’t as rigid in terms of sub-genre. There was fast hip-hop, acid house, Brit-hop and futuristic hip-hop; there were samples, drum machines, and sampled drums—but it was all sort of just one thing, and we’ve always liked the chaotic, free feeling of that,” Hutson says. “And we’ve always done this, right? That was our thing with experimental music, too; we wanted to draw connections between techniques of experimental music and the techniques hip hop producers use. Really, we try not to ever think that we’re doing anything new. We try to think that we are making new combinations.”

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].