4 out of 5

Label: Third Worlds / Harvest

Produced by: Death Grips

They came, there were double entendres, they offended – or maybe only intended to, who knows – and they quit.  Yip yip, ya’ made some interesting music, it was nice knowing you.

Quitting, it seems, can be a nice shortcut for removing expectations, both from your audience and those you’ve set for yourself.  And as Fuck Off as Death Grips has wanted to seem, they undoubtedly backed themselves into a corner assailed by such expectations.  So they quit, and then they came back, and wouldn’t you know: Delivered their best album to date.

Money Store and boners are way in our rear view; people have moved on to other things.  While DG were undoubtedly aiming for the eyebrow-raising anti-attention they earned, maybe its nice to get back to basics; to making music.  Death Grips have never purely done this.  They’ve flirted with it, purposefully ducking out of pigeon-holes, and leaning more into hip-hop or electronics album to album, but I don’t know that they ever sounded like a band with a groove, and on Bottomless Pit they finally do.

That might be due to – to my ears – letting Zach Hill take the lead, as these songs finally expose themselves as Hella-like freakouts, vocalist Burnett spitting or rhyming atop, channeling his angry-man persona into something more unleashed – witness his babbling on Hot Head – which suits the music just fine.  Guitars are suddenly a thing, leading us to more viable hooks and a satisfying punk ethic underlying the album, especially as bookended by the rush of opener Giving Bad People Good Ideas and the thrash of the vulgar title track – the “I’ll fuck you in half” lyrics for which finally feel at home within the context of the disc, and not just Grips being bird-flipping for the sake of it.

Still, despite my wishy-washy appreciation of the group’s prior releases, experimentation has always been their driving force, and Bottomless Pit ups the ants in that from track to track, pushing the limitation of what a head-banging drumbeat or thumping bass can contain, confines of this space scratched at by the fidgety electronics and Stefan’s warbles.

Bottomless Pit is so satisfying on these laurels that it can almost see its way through what could be considered DG filler, where things just settle on a beat and a vocal hook and then play out for a few minutes.  Such tracks can even be a successful reprieve from the crazy if sequenced correctly, but unfortunately Pit decides to smash all these songs together in a run – Bubbles Buried in This Jungle, Trash, Houdini – and the middle of the album gets a little unmotivating as a result.  BB Poison course slowly course corrects, and then we’re fully back on track until the album’s close.

Since Bottomless Pit offers an interestingly cynical callback to single Aye-Aye with the excellent and humorous Eh, it’s possible to see this as the actual final album of DG’s career, looking back at where they started.  Which would sort of be a shame, as this could be the start of an amazing second wind, but might as well go out on your strongest note.