Death Grips Use a Napkin to Announce Their Split

It was never going to be anything normal, was it? Last night the experimental hip-hop group Death Grips publicly announced that they were breaking up, by writing it on a napkin and posting the picture to their Facebook page. The inscribed message was characteristically off-kilter:

“we are now at our best and so Death Grips is over. we have officially stopped. all currently scheduled live dates are canceled. our upcoming double album “the powers that b” will still be delivered worldwide later this year via Harvest/Third Worlds Records. Death Grips was and always has been a conceptual art exhibition anchored by sound and vision. above and beyond a “band”. to our truest fans, please stay legend.”

Since forming in 2010 Zach Hill, Steffan Burnett and Andy Morin have prided themselves on dark, experimental beats and unusual methods of exposure. Exmilitary, their first EP, was released as a free download and spread across the internet like wildfire. They kept their identities under wraps and initially stuck to playing small venues with little publicity. Only their second album, The Money Store was ever actually released retail and even that one ‘leaked’ shortly before its commercial release.

Their then label Epic Records ended up dropping them like a bad habit when they went around them to put their third album, No Love Deep Web out for free before its scheduled release. The band gained a reputation for unusual behavior, not least when they failed to show up at Lollapalooza and one adjacent gig, causing an angry crowd to destroy their equipment, only to discover that the drum kit on the stage was a child’s learning kit. They had never intended to play either show, it turned out.

Reportedly their upcoming double-album The Powers That B is still set to be released as planned with Björk as a featured artist. The first half of the album went online earlier in the year as a standalone 8-track release called Niggas on the Moon. Whether or not the film project that Zach Hill had reportedly been working on with Death Grips will still go ahead is unknown. What is known is that all upcoming shows have been cancelled, up to and including a slot on tour with Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden. NiN frontman Trent Reznor is apparently as bewildered by all this as everyone else, as a reactionary tweet on his part illustrates.

Death Grips seemed to always make a point of doing things differently and their surprise split has been a similar story. It’s possible that more news about it will surface in the coming days but for the time being all we have to go on is a napkin.