On March 14th, 2025, Sub Pop will release Clipping’s sixth album, Dead Channel Sky, the group’s long-awaited Cyberpunk and Hip Hop project. The album features the previously released tracks “Run It” and “Keep Pushing,” along with the highlights “Welcome Home Warrior (Feat. Aesop Rock),” “Code,” and today’s offering, “Change the Channel.”
 
Dead Channel Sky also features guest appearances from Nels Cline, Bitpanic, Tia Nomore, and Sub Pop labelmates Cartel Madras, and was produced and mixed by Clipping and Steve Kaplan and mastered by Levi Seitz at Black Belt Mastering. Dead Channel Sky follows the release of the group’s acclaimed horrorcore series Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020) and There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019), also available from Sub Pop.
 
In the coming days, Clipping will also share the intense official video for “Change the Channel” directed by Merawi Gerima. 
 
Clipping are also announcing headlining North American tour dates in support of Dead Channel Sky, which begins March 14th with a hometown show in Los Angeles at The Echoplex and May 3rd in Sacramento at Goldfield. Clipping will appear at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival on Saturday, March 29th, 2025. Please find a complete list of dates below.
 

 
Dead Channel Sky will be available on CD/2xLP/DSPs from Sub Pop. LP preorders from megamart.subpop.com (US) and Mega Mart 2 (UK/EU) and your local record store will receive the limited Loser edition vinyl on Emerald/Forest Green Ghostly Mashup (North America) and Neon Pink (UK/Europe). There is also a Silver vinyl edition available from independent retailer Rough Trade in the US and UK (All limited edition vinyl colors are available while stock lasts!). The Dead Channel Sky album art was created by Designers Republic.
 

Because of their mix of hellified gangster shit and progressive compositions, I once jokingly called Clipping “Deathrow Tull.” Well, it’s not a joke anymore. While their last few projects have been record-long concepts like the classic prog rock of old, Dead Channel Sky is mixtape-like, a carefully curated collection of songs in which every track is a love letter to a possible present. Like a mashup of distinct elements, the overall concept is there, but the result is brief glimpses into a world rather than an overview of it. It sounds crisp and classic at the same time. When something strikes us as retrospective and futuristic at the same time, it’s a reminder of how slipshod our present moment truly is.
 
In my book Dead Precedents: How Hip-Hop Defines the Future, I draw what Walter Benjamin would call correspondences between early hip-hop culture and cyberpunk literature, the binary stars of the solar system at the end of the millennium. I exploit their similarities to illustrate how the cultural practices of hip-hop have informed the cultural practices of the now. Hip-hop was borne of the post-apocalyptic scene in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. Its repurposing of outmoded technology, the hand-styled hieroglyphic screennames on every colorfast surface, and the gyrating dance moves—an entire culture forged from the freshest of what was available at hand—mirrors the post-apocalyptic techno-scrounge of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Rudy Rucker’s Software, and other early works by the contributors to Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology (Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Sterling himself, among others). Add the leather-clad mohawks of Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force or Rammellzee’s B-boy battle armor and a blend of the two comes further into focus.
 
Juxtaposing high-tech, corporate command-and-control systems (the “cyber”) with the lo-fi, D.I.Y. underground (the “punk”), cyberpunk proper starts in 1982 and ends in 1999, from Blade Runner to The Matrix. There are works before and works since that embody the visions and values of cyberpunk, but these dates act as rough parameters for their assimilation into the larger social sphere, for the time it took cyberpunk to become cyberculture. In the meantime, hip-hop matured, went through its Golden Era, then melted into further forms. Over the same decades, it went from “Planet Rock” to “Bring da Ruckus” to “Hard Knock Life,” from Fab 5 Freddy to Public Enemy to Missy Elliott, from Run-DMC to N.W.A. to Notorious B.I.G. While other genres flirted with it, hip-hop was fickle and fey. Any tryst with the odd bedfellow was a one-night stand at best. Rap and rock birthed mutant offspring maligned by most, and hip-hop’s relations with electronica rarely fared any better.
 
Those twin suns—hip-hop and cyberpunk—both rose in the 1970s and warmed the wider world during the 1980s and 1990s. What if someone explicitly merged them into one set and sound? After all, both movements are the result of hacking the haunted leftovers of a war-torn culture that’s long since moved on.
 
On Dead Channel Sky, Clipping texture-map the twin histories of hip-hop and cyberpunk onto an alternate present where Rammellzee and Bambaataa are the superheroes of old; where Cybotron and Mantronix are the reigning legends; where Egyptian Lover and Freestyle are debated endlessly, and Ultramag and Public Enemy are the undeniable forefathers; where the lost movements of the 1980s and the 1990s are still happening: rave, trip-hop, hip-house, acid house, drum & bass, big beat—the detritus of a different timeline, the survivors of armed audio warfare. That war at thirty-three and a third, its atrocities imprinted upon yet another generation, what someone once called, “the presence of the significance of things” without a hint of ambiguity.
 
Clipping are very story-oriented. They deal in ontology and narrative as much as beats and rhymes. They’ve been approaching making music like writing science fiction since the band’s conception. Two of their records have been nominated for Hugo Awards (one of science fiction’s top literary prizes), and a novella spun-off from their music was nominated for a third. As Clipping, they’ve collaborated with as many of their fellow experimental noise artists as they have fellow rappers. Here those co-conspirators include everyone from the guitarist Nels Cline on the outro to “Dodger” (titled “Malleus”) to their labelmates Cartel Madras on “Mirrorshades, pt. 2,” rapper/actor Tia Nomore on “Scams,” as well the wordy wordsmith Aesop Rock on “Welcome Home Warrior.” Diggs is known for intricate lyrics and rapid-fire rapping, and the tracks that Snipes and Hutson build in the background are no less complex. On “Code,” they sample narrated memories from the Afrofuturist documentary The Last Angel of History; and on “Dominator,” they repurpose a line from the classic Dutch hardcore track “Dominator” by Human Resource. All of the above serves to give us a glimpse of an adjacent possible present, where hip-hop and cyberpunk are one culture.
 
Binary stars are often perceived as one object when viewed with the naked eye. Like those twin sun systems, it’ll take some special equipment and some discerning attention to pull the stars apart on this record. As Diggs barks on the fire-starting “Change the Channel”: Everything is very important!

Clipping
Dead Channel Sky
 
CD + Digital Tracklisting:
1. Intro
2. Dominator
3. Change the Channel
4. Run It
5. Go
6. Simple Degradation (Plucks 1-13) (with Bitpanic)
7. Code
8. Dodger
9. Malleus (with Nels Cline)
10. Scams (feat. Tia Nomore)
11. Keep Pushing
12. “From Bright Bodies” (Interlude)
13. Mood Organ
14. Polaroids
15. Simple Degradation (Plucks 14-18) (with Bitpanic)
16. Madcap
17. Mirrorshades pt. 2 (feat. Cartel Madras)
18. “And You Called” (Interlude)
19. Welcome Home Warrior (feat. Aesop Rock)
20. Ask What Happened
 
2xLP Tracklisting:
A1. Intro
A2. Dominator
A3. Change the Channel
A4. Run It
A5. Go
B1. Code
B2. Dodger
B3. Malleus (with Nels Cline)
B4. Scams (ft. Tia Nomore)
C1. Keep Pushing
C2. Mood Organ
C3. Polaroids
C4. Madcap
D1. Mirrorshades pt. 2 (ft. Cartel Madras)
D2. Welcome Home Warrior (ft. Aesop Rock)
D3. Ask What Happened

Today, November 12th, Clipping shares “Keep Pushing,” a driving new jam with electro-funk and big-beat elements, written and produced by the group, featuring strings from John W. Snyder, mixed by Steve Kaplan, and mastered by Levi Seitz at Blackbelt Mastering.
 
“Keep Pushing” is another offering from Clipping’s forthcoming new album, a long-in-the-works Hip-Hop and Cyberpunk project, due worldwide from Sub Pop in 2025. It follows the release of the group’s acclaimed horrorcore series Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020) and There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019), also available from Sub Pop.
 
Last month, Clipping released the official video for the single “Run It.” Consequence of Sound says of the track, “It seems as if Clipping have rediscovered their love for rave-ready bangers — at least Clipping’s fucked up version of a rave-ready banger. ‘Run It’ is a relentless, skittering, up-tempo rager complete with noisy embellishments and Daveed Diggs’ technical flows. In other words, it goes nuts.”
 
Stereogum said, “It’s a fast, physical rap attack…On ‘Run It,’ Daveed Diggs goes into athletic overdrive, rapping over a pulsing, clanking, extremely fast beat from his bandmates Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson. The track’s smears of digital noise sometimes cohere into Detroit techno riffs. This is a good one — a track that keeps all the prickly intensity of clipping.’s music without getting so extreme that you couldn’t play it on your headphones while you’re on the treadmill. In the quick-cut Lawrence Klein-directed video, secret agents tail clipping. through DC, Berlin, Prague, New Delhi, Bangkok, and Seoul, on some Jason Bourne/Carmen Sandiego shit.”
 
Clipping will appear at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival on Saturday, March 29th, 2025. Tickets for the fest are on sale now—additional tour dates to be announced soon.

Today, September 12th, Clipping shares the official video for the new song “Run It,” directed by Lawrence Klein. The fast-paced visual, which stars the group (Daveed Diggs, Jonathan Snipes, William Hutson) as a jet-setting international criminal export organization, was shot across three continents and six countries (US, Germany, South Korea, Thailand, India, and the Czech Republic). “Run It” was written and produced by Clipping, mixed by Steve Kaplan, and mastered by Levi Seitz at Blackbelt Mastering.
 
“Run It” is from Clipping’s forthcoming new album, a long-in-the-works Hip-Hop and Cyberpunk project, due worldwide from Sub Pop in 2025. This is also the first new material since the release of the group’s acclaimed horrorcore series Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020) and There Existed An Addiction To Blood (2019), also available from Sub Pop.
 
Clipping will appear at Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival on Saturday, March 29th, 2025. Tickets for the fest are on sale now—additional tour dates to be announced soon.

Today, Tuesday, February 20th, marks the release of a split single featuring Clipping’s “Tipsy” and Cooling Prongs’ “Midnight,” available worldwide from Sub Pop.
 
Clipping’s “Tipsy” was previously only available as part of the 2020 Save Stereogum, an exclusive ‘00s Covers Comp and crowdfunding campaign for the site’s supporters. Clipping was one of 40 artists asked to record never-before-heard covers of songs from 2000-2009. Clipping says, “J-Kwon’s ‘Tipsy’ is one of the greatest party rap songs of all time. We could never make a beat as hard as the original, so we took our version in another direction — something like if Skinny Puppy had somehow remixed it in the late 1980s.”
 
“Midnight” by Cooling Prongs (AKA Christopher Fleeger, who collaborated with Clipping on Double Live) is a musique concrète tribute to Ice-T’s classic track of the same name. Fleeger’s process involved recording for many weeks, every night between midnight and 6am, with microphones mounted to the outside of his van, at all the locations mentioned in the lyrics to the original song. Hundreds of hours of audio were edited and arranged to create a field-recording companion to the journey the rapper describes through South Central Los Angeles, from the AMPM location on Vermont, through all of the intersections he names, finally ending at Ice-T’s childhood home, just off Crenshaw.
 
Clipping’s “Tipsy” and Cooling Prongs’ “Midnight” split single is available now worldwide digitally from Sub Pop. Fans in North America can purchase the 7” single, which is limited to 2,000 copies, from megamart.subpop.com, select independent retail stores, and Clipping’s Bandcamp page. In the UK and Europe, the 7” is available to preorder now through select UK/EU Independent retailers and Sub Pop’s new Mega Mart 2 (estimated to ship in mid-March).
 
Clipping has also scheduled a series of UK & European tour dates for 2024, which begin Thursday, April 18th in Tilburg, NL with an appearance at the Roadburn Festival, and run through Thursday, April 25th in Leeds, UK at Project House.
 
Fri. Apr. 19 - Tilburg, NL - Roadburn Festival
Sat. Apr. 20 - Krems an der Donau, AT - Donaufestival
Sun. Apr. 21 - Munich, DE - Zirka
Mon. Apr. 23 - Koln, DE - Club Volta
Wed. Apr. 24 - Brussels, BE - Les Nuits Botanique
Thu. Apr. 25 - Leeds, UK- Project House