There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019)

The music video for “Nothing is Safe,” the first single from There Existed an Addiction to Blood, fades in on a burning metal barrel, left-justified, with the cut-out face of a smiling jack-o-lantern. Daveed Diggs’s lyrics appear and disappear in orange on the right as the camera slowly zooms in. A single key on a piano isn’t so much played as it pulsates. Horror fans and those susceptible to cultural osmosis will recognize this video as an homage to John Carpenter’s Halloween. But unlike the threat of that movie, clipping. suggests horror has been weaved into our society, a stain that years of scrubbing hasn’t gotten out.

Experimental hip-hop group clipping.’s third studio album, There Existed an Addiction to Blood, whose title references Bill Gunn’s classic horror movie Ganja & Hess (1973), is a new kind of horrorcore. Diggs’s lyrics drop the misogyny typical of much of the genre, instead focusing largely on racism and its consequences in America. He adopts the second person “you” throughout, putting the listener in the shoes of the characters that populate these songs:

Everybody wanna kill a movement 'fore the moment
But they cannot kill what cannot die
There wasn't ever really an opponent
For what they figured was only three-fifth-human
And they thought they could enslave
By disconnecting from the truth (“Blood of the Fang”)

So what them books got you but dreams of everything lost?
What does sleep bring you but screams at night where you toss?
And turn hope into stone, your motto embossed
Stay alive at all costs (“He Dead”)

Production by William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes ranges from feedback-laced industrial sounds (“All In Your Head”) to harsh noise (“La Mala Ordina”), the perfect accompaniment to Diggs’s relentless and speedy flow. Three interludes interspersed throughout (a woman recalling a haunting on a tape recorder, a sample of the final track, and another woman being hypnotized by a malevolent therapist) allow for some on-theme breathers. The closing track, Annea Lockwood’s “Piano Burning” (it’s exactly what it sounds like), ends the album on an eerie note, ushering listeners past the one-hour mark with crackling wood and snapping piano strings. The End? 4.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—Nate Logan