Clipping clean out the vaults to deliver their 6-track EP Wriggle, out now on Sub Pop. It’s been two years since the experimental rap trio delivered their lauded label debut CLPPNG, and in the intervening time, the members have been busy pursuing other important life projects.
The production team’s William Hutson completed his Ph.D. in Theater and Performance Studies, with a dissertation on experimental music, while the other half of that duo, Jonathan Snipes, composed scores for the feature films Starry Eyes, The Nightmare, Excess Flesh, etc. The group’s rapper Daveed Diggs is also an actor, and in the two years since, he has been in the acclaimed Broadway musical Hamilton playing the roles of the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson–which he helped develop with the show’s originator, Lin-Manuel Miranda. So, this is a busy and brainy bunch to be sure!
Sub Pop reports that Wriggle collects together tracks that weren’t done in time to make it onto CLPPNG, as the trio clears room to begin work on a brand new long-player. Today we watch the “lyric video” for the EP’s title track, and like much that the group does, it subverts even that concept. While visually the words to the track might be mostly illegible, on the cut Diggs fires razor-sharp diction with hyper-kinetic dexterity. The track is built around a sample from the Whitehouse song “Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel“, and production-wise it follows William Bennett‘s noise-driven tact with serrating synth whir, blistering drum-lines, and jaw grinding bass.
