Death Grips, a rap band from Sacramento, did something quite unusual: they made their new album ‘No Love Web’ available to the public, before sharing it with their label Epic, which was supposed to release the album only in 2013. The band took on Twitter to announce it:
‘The label wouldn't confirm a release date for NO LOVE DEEP WEB 'till next year sometime,’
‘The label will be hearing the album for the first time with you.’
Then Death Grips’ website was shut down several hours later! The band posted the news on Twitter again, ‘our sight just got shut down- BASIC AS FUCK’, leading everyone to think that the label was behind the action, although Epic denied it a few hours later. However the music is still on Soundclound for everyone to listen to, and download links are all over the internet.
Another thing, the original cover art is a picture of an erect penis, and you still can see the thing on Pitchfork (yes, Pitchfork, and of course, it's totally graphic, you have been warned), but be reassured, the too-ugly-for-prime-time thing has now been covered with a black rectangle. The theory is that it would have been impossible to sell the original cover in regular stores, so why not throwing it on the internet?
I don’t know why Pitchfork is all over them – err, could it be because Death Grips is part of their upcoming music festival in Paris? – but I've tried to listen to the album, and….. I know that rap isn’t my thing in the first place but ouch! I just couldn’t make it through the whole album! This constant paranoiac-menacing-aggressive screaming behind all this minimalist scratching electro-noise, I am all for anti commercial material, but this is boring after a while.
So now they are the new heroes of all the internets for having done such a punk move, and their album was the most legally downloaded one on BitTorrent this Monday. But I wonder why they are on a label in the first place, if they want to do it on their own, they should just leave Epic! Anyway it was a good publicity stunt, everyone is talking about Death Grips now.