Clipse Talk Love, Hate, and What Rap’s Been Missing

“First of all, the time that I took off was necessary,” Malice says. “I don’t regret that at all. But I didn’t want to squander my real estate in this little piece of what I have to offer, what I have to say in my contribution. I think it was meant for me to sit down for the time that I did, but I think now is the perfect time just to give my contribution to hip-hop.”

The other longstanding critical Clipse opinion: that Malice is simply the sharper of the two, something Pusha has always been unbothered by, even once rapping: “Say my brother better? Big deal…second fiddle to my own gene pool/We laugh about it, that’s cool/I’m at the top and he better? If you think about it, we rule.”

“You tell me,” Pusha says with a laugh when asked who’s rapping better on the new stuff, sharing that their friend Mike Camargo told him, “‘He’s sounding better than you on 80% of this.’ I mean, people are saying it. And I can’t wait for everyone to hear it, because I feel like they’re really going to appreciate the actual duo of us whether you’re a new or old fan.” Malice is smirking to Pusha’s left as he says this; the brothers are clearly fans of each other first and foremost. The only person who missed hearing Malice spit like this more than rap fans of a certain age was Pusha himself.

Malice points to “POV,” a slow-tempo that finds Pusha ratcheting up that disdainful, disaffected talk-flow he favors sometimes to obscene levels as his favorite Terrence verse on the project, while Pusha selects “FICO,” a boisterous track featuring Stove God Cooks on the hook, as his Gene pick. But tellingly, both brothers point to the new single, “Ace Trumpets,” as their favorite song overall. The least busy beat, and the least high-concept conceit: just hard 808s and hard flexes, i.e., Malice rapping “Never leave the house without my piece like I’m Mahatma.”

“I find pleasure in that,” Push says.

In just talking your shit?

“Yeah, man, because I think that’s what it’s about. It’s stunting. But it still shows that there’s a technique and a style to it.”

“I feel like these are the things missing in rap and why it’s so disposable,” Malice adds. “Shit like this, the stickiness of records like that and verses like that is what keeps this going and what keeps rap around—good rap around.”

Still, it wouldn’t be a Clipse album without some label woes nearly derailing the fun even after the product was cooked to purity. The duo’s lore is, of course, marked by the label politics that delayed a quick follow-up to their debut album, Lord Willin’, forcing them to dominate the mixtape circuit with their seminal We Got It 4 Cheap series while crafting Hell Hath No Fury with a chip on their shoulder. What happened with Let God Sort Em Out is less dramatic, but it’s a situation with massive reverberations nonetheless.