Clipping: Clppng

As with hurling in some counties, there’s always a crisis brewing in hip-hop. The sound is wide and deep, with berths for all comers, from those who want their beats peppered with poppy EDM to those who want to keep it real in the old- fashioned sense. This crisis and conflict about what hip-hop actually signifies and represents can occasionally get a little tiring.

It's clear that Clipping have little truck with worrying unduly about such definitions. The LA trio arrived last year with Midcity, kicked down lots of doors, and attracted the attention of the Sub Pop label. With Clppng, they've returned to put a different type of blood in the music. Midcity was an audacious and bracing affair, and Clppng is a much more toned and nuanced tour-de- force. More noise, but different noise.

Clipping specialise in visceral tension. You have William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes fronting the all-guns-blazing barrage of explosive and experimental noise (they have previous form producing music for visual media), while Daveed Diggs delivers the lyrical wake-up calls.

Thanks to Diggs's sharp skill as a wordsmith, tracks such as Work Work, Inside Out and Get Up (with an alarm clock as the only instrument) are loaded with feverish images and paranoid observations. The industrial cling and clang of the soundbed, meanwhile, ratchets up the panic a few notches.

Clipping also toy with your expectations, and Tonight has all the makings of a decent club banger before you realise that the guys are probably on a podium sneering rather than smiling.

Clipping and Clppng are examples of hip-hop's great possibilities. When you're producing sounds as vital, pointed and intense as this, why fret about genre semantics? itsclippingbitch.com

Download: Work Work, Inside Out, Get Up