clipping. – Dead Channel Sky

Equal parts thrilling and tedious, Dead Channel Sky is a cybernetic haze of industrial wreckage and conceptual overreach that occasionally forgets to have fun, mistaking clutter for complexity. The album leans into a Commodore 64-era cyberpunk aesthetic, even sampling John Akomfrah’s Afrofuturist film The Last Angel of History. Conversely, Mirrorshades pt. 2 sits somewhere between Kraftwerk’s Pocket Calculator and Love Shack by The B-52s. Though this is an atmospheric outlier, it does prove that clipping. are just as engaging when they're having fun, dialling down the conceptual earnestness and placing the tongue firmly in cheek.

Peripherally, this juxtaposition elucidates the core of the album’s unevenness: amidst the conceptual surfeit, Daveed Diggs can oscillate between razor-sharp insight and tonal misfire that scan as misplaced Dunning-Kruger-confidence. For every contextually jarring 'You push so many keys that it's resembling Gitmo / Remember that place / Nobody else does' thematic southpaw, there is a counterweighted 'The ingenue was an opp'.

Dead Channel Sky’s brilliance is front-loaded: Dominator is a 90s house-infused jackhammer and Change the Channel’s Prodigy-inflected stomp allow for Run It to be suffused by clipping.’s budding relationship with the 303, reminiscent of something from The Crystal Method’s Vegas. This vitality soon becomes mired in conceptual slog – testament that clipping. are capable of greatness but struggle to stay consistently great.

Listen to: Change the Channel, Run It, Mirrorshades pt. 2