Visions of Bodies Being Burned (2020)

Visions of Bodies Being Burned is the fourth studio album by American hip hop group clipping. It was released on October 23, 2020 through Sub Pop. It received positive reviews from music critics.

Background and recording

Clipping described Visions of Bodies Being Burned in a press release as a "second half of a planned diptych", continuing the horrorcore and industrial stylings of their previous release There Existed an Addiction to Blood. Both albums were recorded during 2015–2020, following their sci-fi themed sophomore album Splendor & Misery, with the band creating too many songs to fit on one release and then dividing them into two parts with the help of their label, Sub Pop. Originally, Clipping intended to release Visions of Bodies Being Burned several months after There Existed an Addiction to Blood, however, the COVID-19 pandemic forced their record label to postpone the album until 2020 Halloween season.

In the time between There Existed an Addiction to Blood and Visions of Bodies Being Burned, Clipping also released the single "Chapter 319", which sampled a DJ Screw song featuring George Floyd as Big Floyd, along with a previously SoundCloud-only track "Knees on the Ground" on Bandcamp and donated all proceeds from the sales to organizations dedicated to racial justice. "Chapter 319" was recorded during the protests after the murder of George Floyd, while "Knees on the Ground" was originally recorded after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. "Chapter 319" became a meme on TikTok, consisting of teenagers rapping along to a line from the song calling US president Donald Trump a white supremacist and filming their parents' reactions.

Music and lyrics

The album continues the slasher film themes and abrasive production style of Clipping's previous album, There Existed an Addiction to Blood, essentially serving as its second half. According to the band, the album "contains sixteen more scary stories disguised as rap songs, incorporating as much influence from Ernest Dickerson, Clive Barker, and Shirley Jackson as it does from Three 6 Mafia, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and Brotha Lynch Hung". As with other Clipping albums, Daveed Diggs' lyrics avoid first-person narration, primarily describing the events in third person or addressing the listener in second person.

The production on the album is heavy, often bordering on distortion, with influences from both modern industrial, noise, power electronics and 1980s horror movie soundtracks. Describing his disappointment with many concept albums that he encountered being still primarily "guitar-drums-bass", producer Jonathan Snipes stressed that the band aimed to choose timbres and sounds that were meaningful in the context of the songs and referenced concepts described in the lyrics. The band are known for their meticulous approach to sampling and avoidance of using pre-made royalty-free sounds, recording all of the samples and sound effects themselves. On the closer, "Secret Piece", and throughout the album, Clipping also use a number of dawn chorus recordings that Snipes and field recordist Christopher Fleeger made at famous murder sites, one of which was cited as the Black Dahlia murder site, which Snipes woke up before dawn for a week to do field recording at.

The title of the album quotes a line by Scarface from "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" by Geto Boys, sampled in re-recorded form on the album's first single, "Say the Name", which also references the 1992 slasher film Candyman. For the chorus of "Say the Name", which repeats the quote, the band recorded Diggs's voice and pitched it down, since the vocal track of "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" was never available separately. The song was already "old to them", according to the band, by the time they were sequencing their previous album, There Existed an Addiction to Blood, and was meant to be its second single, however, obtaining permission for the sample proved difficult. Since "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" itself contains a sample of "Hung Up on My Baby" by Isaac Hayes, permission had to be obtained from his estate also, even though no part of Hayes's work is in "Say the Name"; yet, as a result, the Isaac Hayes estate owns a larger percent of "Say the Name" than Clipping members or Scarface. According to the band, the extended instrumental coda of the song was inspired by the Nine Inch Nails song "Closer", since early on during the production of the song, the drum sounds reminded them of it.