For over two decades, Pusha T and Malice — the Virginia brothers who make up the rap duo Clipse — have tended to a very specific corner of hip-hop. As a unit and apart, they have been the purists, the moralists, the keepers of a traditionalist flame that lies perilously close to nostalgia, but somehow remains alive with possibility. While the genre has iterated countless times around and beside them, the pair remained faithful to a subject (drug dealing) and a style (ice pick-sharp minimalism) that might not have made them superstars, but has cemented them as a connoisseur’s pick, immune to trends.
“Let God Sort Em Out,” out July 11, is the fourth Clipse studio album and first since 2009. Produced in full by Pharrell Williams, a longtime collaborator and benefactor, it is like a familiar cold plunge: harsh, reassuring, invigorating. The LP is a clear continuation of the work they did in the 2000s that made them favorites of street-rap realists and internet-fueled curio seekers.
But the duo has also focused its single-minded pugnaciousness, turning it into a refined marketing savvy. For years, Clipse’s commitment to form and code has put them at odds with key figures in the genre. The most recent is Travis Scott, rap’s big-tent carnival barker, whom Pusha T calls on the carpet on a new single, “So Be It.”
Once cordial acquaintances in the Kanye West universe, the two diverged following an incident in Paris, when Scott premiered new music for Clipse and Pharrell while withholding that he was collaborating with Drake, a known foe. “That was corny,” Pusha T said recently in an interview for Popcast, The New York Times’s music podcast. “He’s shameless.”
Pusha T’s long-running feud with Drake — it was he who announced to the world, in “The Story of Adidon,” from 2018, that Drake had a son — has hovered over much of the music Pusha T has released in the last few years.
The new Clipse album features a verse from another chief Drake antagonist, Kendrick Lamar. Quarrels with Def Jam, Clipse’s former label, over the content and optics of the track led to the brothers buying out their contracts to proceed unencumbered, they said. (Drake is currently suing Def Jam’s corporate parent, Universal Music, for defamation over Lamar’s smash “Not Like Us.”)
That kind of music industry tension has shaped Clipse’s career from the beginning. With its first studio album shelved and second release long delayed, the group turned to recording mixtapes and was among the first acts to understand that going direct to fans online could be more valuable than relying on a label.
Still, Clipse’s peak in the mid-to-late 2000s was short-lived as the brothers took separate paths: Pusha T, born Terrence Thornton, joined forces with West (now Ye), becoming the president of his G.O.O.D. Music label and releasing a string of vividly stoic solo albums. Elder brother Malice, or Gene Thornton, retreated from rap, delving deep into religion; eventually, he released a pair of Christian-oriented albums as No Malice.
Now back together, the brothers have resumed their familiar roles — Pusha T as the firestarter, Malice the stern observer. “I don’t have it in me to lie,” Pusha T, 48, said.
For Malice, 52, the supplementary noise of industry quarrels is a distraction, but perhaps a necessary evil. “I could vomit every time I have to hear somebody else’s name in our interviews — that we can’t just get back to the music,” he said. “All the red tape, all the politics. I don’t like nothing about it, but I’m cool because I’ve seen it before. I didn’t expect much to change. The only thing I’m elated about is to make the kind of music that we make and just to be arm in arm with my brother.”
The two spoke to Popcast about the unavoidable static with Ye and others; their ethics, musical and otherwise; their upbringing and parenting styles; and what it was like recording the album at Pharrell’s Louis Vuitton offices in Paris. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
JOE COSCARELLI “Til the Casket Drops” came out in 2009 and we haven’t heard another Clipse album until now. Malice, when was the conversation with your brother to say, hey, I need a break from rap?
MALICE We were actually in California and we had met with Rick Rubin [at his Shangri-La studio in Malibu] — no phone, no shoes. I can recall listening to my brother and Rick Rubin talk about things that we should do and I’m thinking, They can talk all they want — I’m about to leave. But I had to entertain the conversation. It was that very night after we left, we get back to the hotel and we’re in the elevator and I told him, I’m not gonna be able to continue doing this. I had things on my mind. And I knew it was time to take a step back.
JON CARAMANICA Pusha, how caught off guard were you in that moment?
PUSHA T I knew what he was feeling the whole time. He felt cheated, in every sense, by the business. But at that time, I was just like, man, we gotta keep pedaling. I definitely couldn’t stop knowing how much real estate we had left on the table.
COSCARELLI Malice, how much of the decision to step away from hip-hop was a moral one to you? Did you feel there was something unholy about what you were doing as Clipse?
MALICE Yeah, definitely. I had become quite friendly with the world and I had to be able to live with myself at the end of the day. So it wasn’t lining up with who I truly was.
CARAMANICA You have referred to your album “Hell Hath No Fury” as an “emotional drug record.” As Clipse, you’re often hinting at internal struggle, but you’re not necessarily putting it right out there. And on this album, it’s right in the first song, “Birds Don’t Sing,” about losing both your parents in relatively quick succession a couple of years ago.
PUSHA T The idea to lead with it on the album came from the process of creating the record, which was unbearably hard. I knew that this was going to touch people and I felt like we should pull them in with that.
COSCARELLI Coming together as brothers again, did it feel important to reintroduce yourselves that way, to honor your parents and how they raised you?
MALICE I think so. The way that they parented us, that’s a narrative that needs to be spoken about. People need to hear it, especially in our community. It’s OK if you didn’t come up with both of your parents, but you can change it if you want to. I think it’s very important that we be there for our kids. My brother, he really never played about that, even before he had kids. If you weren’t taking care of your kids, you can’t come hang out with us in the club. If you’re not doing nothing for your kids then what kind of friend can you be to me?
CARAMANICA How has parenting changed your thinking about creativity or the message of the songs?
MALICE I’m a parent. I’m a grandparent. But I’ve always been conscious of the things that I say, that I put out into the world. I’ve said a lot of things that I knew better than, but the fact that I did it, I still talked about it. I’ve always painted both sides. I recall on a record I said, “I seen ’em pay for they fix when they kids couldn’t eat.” That was a real line — that’s something I really saw, with a mother that I dealt with and her kids were hungry. I talk about how those kinds of things made me feel.
PUSHA T I think because of the way I was raised, and particularly my dad, I’ve always looked at music as more creativity and entertainment and never thought about it, or cared about what I put out there, like the ethics of it.
Man, I’ll never forget, he took us to the movies to watch Chucky or Freddy [Krueger, from “A Nightmare on Elm Street”]. Of course, we come back home and I’m scared, I cry and my dad does not understand. You know, I’m the fool. Even at a young age: “You better have some common sense! You know that was a damn movie. It’s not real.”
MALICE Meanwhile, all of his friends end up in jail. All of them! [Laughs] Like all of them. So, you know, for him — great. But for everyone else, not so much.
CARAMANICA How are you guys as parents?
PUSHA T I am soft — 1,000 percent. I am totally the pushover. Like, man, I’m here today, my wife and my son are home in Virginia. When I come home, I can’t look at my son and get into reprimanding him about hardly anything. I mean, it better be crazy.
MALICE I’ve pretty much raised my children, they’re grown now. But my wife and I got compliments all the time of how well-behaved and mannered our kids are and were.
COSCARELLI I really see the big brother, little brother dynamic at work here.
MALICE I have pictures at my house of me and my brother, and in most of the pictures, I am looking like I’m just very pensive and he’s smiling. I think that comes across the exact same way in our music.
COSCARELLI On the first single from this album, “Ace Trumpets,” Pusha, you allude to leaving the situation with Ye after getting tired of the mess — “Look at them, him and him, still waitin’ on Yeezy.” Do you regret moments where you might have held your tongue during your time in his orbit?
PUSHA T I don’t even know if I ever held my tongue. I always spoke to everything. But what you do with that information, in taking advice or perspective from me, that’s what you do. But I don’t regret any of it. I mean, we made great music. Outside of music, we’re nothing. Outside of that, his principles, his morals, his mind-set — we don’t see eye to eye hardly ever and we never have.
CARAMANICA Can you talk about what you guys bring out of Pharrell? These spare, minimal, organized-chaos beats — what it is about you that puts Pharrell in that direction? And what is it about those beats that allows you to be expressive in the way that you are?
PUSHA T The Clipse wants a certain thing and a certain sound, and I tend to believe that we are looking for things that P was a fan of at one point. We search for feeling — that’s how we make music. What did you feel like when you heard “Who Shot Ya?” But it’s funny because Pharrell is such a future person, you can’t use certain words with him in a studio setting because it ruins the mood. He don’t wanna look backward. Never say “nostalgia.” Never bring up an old song trying to get your point across. But what we’ve mastered is searching for a feeling versus a sound. His search is always for the feeling and how to turn it futuristically upside down on its head.
COSCARELLI Set a scene for us from recording at the Louis Vuitton office in Paris.
PUSHA T While we recorded “Birds Don’t Sing,” everybody in the office — sewing, drawing, sketching — was crying. Because the whole song is a conversation and having it out loud — that was just a vulnerable recording session. Everybody felt it. You’ve got to remember, when you get into the Pharrell of it, we’re 30 years deep, maybe 40. Family. And then he’s kind of crazy, too. He thrives on motion. So he’s like, man, no, don’t let it out the room. Lean in. Put salt in the wound right now.
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Joe Coscarelli is a culture reporter for The Times who focuses on popular music and a co-host of the Times podcast “Popcast (Deluxe).”
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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