Clipse 'Hell Hath No Fury' album

After a forced hiatus – and the hottest mixtape release of 2005 – the critically acclaimed, Neptunes-produced duo returns stronger and darker than ever before. "It’s a known fact y'all tired of the circus/ So come home where you smell the crack in the verses" Tourist websites for Virginia Beach show visitors a pretty place. Little kids smile and raise sand-caked palms. Dolphins break water a few miles out from shore. Seagulls race windsurfers in the sunset. Hell Hath No Fury the bleak, stunning and hotly-anticipated second album from Clipse takes listeners on a tour of a different Virginia altogether.

In the late 80s and early 90s the drug trade destroyed this city - the whole seven cities was ravaged by dope, says Pusha T, one half of Clipse. Virginia Beach - part of the "Seven Cities" constellation that includes Norfolk, Newport News, Hampton, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, and Suffolk - lies on the same black-market beltway that connects New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Coming up in this area, Pusha and his older brother Malice saw the effects of the drug trade firsthand. For them, their hometown and its surrounding areas have a lot more in common with an episode of The Wire than a glossy visitor¹s brochure..

But you already know that, because you already know Clipse’s 2002 debut, Lord Willin’. It’s the album that spawned “Grindin,” a thundering, instant classic of gangsta minimalism that stormed the pop charts and ushered in a new era of spare, hammering hip-hop. It’s the album that spawned “When the Last Time,” which proved Clipse’s hard-edged sonics and slick punchlines could storm the clubs, too. It’s the album that the Neptunes produced from top to bottom. It’s the album that sold well over 1 million copies. It’s the album that rocked heads from Justin Timberlake, who put Clipse on his breakout solo single “Like I Love You,” to Diddy, who handpicked the brothers for the star-studded Notorious B.I.G. Duets album.

And it’s the album that made what happened next so maddening. Labels merged, labels disintegrated, executives played musical chairs and Pusha and Malice found themselves shoved on to a new label and caught in a lengthy and confusing contract dispute, a small army of lawyers and a thicket of fine print preventing the release of their second album. “I almost feel like I forgot how to rap, chasing the lawyers and all that,” Malice says. 2003 came and went. 2004 came and went. “We had to do something to make us stay relevant,” Malice recalls. “Time was passing, and we was fading out. You might think you still there, but for the listeners and the fans, you not.”

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So, in 2005 Clipse delivered a one-two punch on the mixtape circuit, releasing We Got it 4 Cheap Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 in quick succession. Vol. 2 proved that mixtapes could be compelling, cohesive albums in their own right, brought Clipse to a new height of lyrical complexity and introduced the Re-Up Gang, fleshed out by the gruff Philly MCs Ab-Liva and Sandman. The streets went wild for it, snapping up well over 50,000 copies on the strength of buzz alone. The critics started gushing, too: AllHipHop.com called the mixtape "a classic." The New York Times called it "thrilling." Blender said it represented “gangsta rap at its most richly provocative.”

Not all hiatuses come to an end, but this one finally has. Clipse are back like the rap Terence Malick – time hasn’t beaten them down or fattened them up, it’s just honed their meticulous craft, broadened their vision and pissed them off. They’re better – and angrier – than ever, and Hell Hath No Fury, produced entirely by the Neptunes and released through Clipse’s brand new imprint, Re-Up Gang records, is powerful proof. This is a dark, cavernous album. Like Sin City, it’s all blacks and grays, with occasional flurries of white and splatters of red. It’s shorn almost entirely of melody, void of syrupy R&B hooks and rhymes about Laffy Taffy. And it features exactly zero ladies’ jams, unless you count the songs Pusha classifies as “hard bitch records.”

The first single, “Mr. Me Too,” featuring Pharrell, sets the ominous tone: it’s already knocking, oozing, slicing and slithering its way up the charts. In his verse, Pusha addresses Clipse’s forced vacation: “Been two years like I was paddywagon cruisin’/ The streets was yours, you dunce cappin’ and kazooin’.”

“It’s like I’ve been locked up,” he explains. “I was watching rap go fucking awry. I love what’s going on in the west and in the south, but what about the genre of music that I’m in and that I’m about? I’m watching east coast rappers make crunk music. I’m watching east coast rappers make bounce music. I’m watching them dummy down.”

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Hell Hath No Fury strikes a brilliant balance between futurism and nostalgia. It’s an album of lyrics-driven hip-hop in the spirit of east coast rap’s early ‘90s heyday, but it’s also powered by the noisiest, meanest, most space-age production the Neptunes have ever served up. “We made Pharrell go into the dungeon for this one,” Pusha says, adding, “We’re trying to make that album where you fall into a movie. Just like you fell into the Wu Tang movie, just like you fell into the Mobb Deep movie, just like you fell into the Gang Starr movie.”

For Clipse, rapping about coke – which they still do, a lot – is part of this nostalgia for hip-hop’s leaner, meaner roots – “it’s a metaphor for the street hustle,” Pusha explains. And it isn’t a one-dimensional enterprise. “Hip-hop has always been a documentary for me,” Pusha says. “Rap is similes, metaphor, color, picture-painting, saying a line that doesn’t hit you until three listens later.” On track after track on Hell Hath No Fury, Malice and Pusha offset nasty threats with other aspects of the drug world: including the victims claimed by the dealer’s greed. “We talk about the consequences and ramifications,” Malice says. “We talk about the jail. We talk about the death. We talk about the whole spectrum.”

“That’s the problem,” Pusha continues. “A lot of rappers don’t implicate themselves, they just give you the upside or the obvious. You start hearing all the clichéd shit.” Clipse reject the notion that in order to qualify as a “conscious rapper” you can’t talk about drugs: “Our music is very conscious,” Malice declares.

Take “Nightmares,” which complicates a woozy, narcotic beat with tales of drug dealer paranoia – it’s a song in the same fraught spirit as the Geto Boys’ “Mind Playing Tricks On Me.” Or the raucous “Mama I’m So Sorry,” in which Pharrell makes a synthesized accordion sound tough and Malice and Pusha aren’t sure whether they should apologize for their greed or celebrate it, describing a lifestyle full of “Ferraris and Salvador Dalis.”

Along the way, Clipse find room for the sort of brags and punch lines that win street corner battles. On “Ain’t Cha,” Pusha calls his closet “Planet of the BAPES” and Malice chuckles about his “Gucci parka, from France where the kids sing ‘Frere Jacques.’” On the chittering, Mantronix-vibed “Ride Around Shinin,’” Pusha even compares his crack-cooking skills to the culinary gifts of an unlikely criminal: “The black Martha Stewart, let me show you how to do it.”

One thing listeners won’t hear on Hell Hath No Fury is an endless parade of skits or guests. Aside from the Re-Up Gang and Star Trak family – like Pharrell and Rosco P. Coldchain (who appears on the pyrotechnic ode to armed home robbery, “Chinese New Year”) the only guests are Slim Thug, who drops in on second single “Wamp Wamp (What It Do),” and Bilal, who lends his smoky croon to “Nightmares.”

“We didn’t want our return to incorporate anyone outside of the family,” Malice says. “We have to be seen as a home unit first.”

“We’ve been gone for too long,” Pusha says. “On this one, you gotta digest us.”

No release date is yet known.

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Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury