clipping.'s second entry in their horror anthology collection follows up 2019's There Existed an Addiction to Blood by conjuring up an atmosphere that rarely allows a moment to catch your breath. William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes' experimental production pushes their concepts even further, drawing inspiration from traditional hip-hop ("Say the Name" mixes a Geto Boys sample within a Chicago house music vibe, while "Eaten Alive" is a disorienting tribute to No Limit Records), power electronics (the blown-out blast of "Make Them Dead"), and EVP field samplings (the urgent "Pain Everyday"). These textured compositions allow Daveed Diggs' narration to take center stage as he reconceptualizes scary-movie tropes with today's modern societal terrors, fleshed out by a couple of eclectic features. Cam & China flip the "final girl" cliché on its head on the uptempo "’96 Neve Campbell," while alt-rap duo Ho99o9 relate inner city violence to auto-cannibalism on the industrial-leaning "Looking Like Meat." Here the Los Angeles-based trio takes Apple Music through the record's many horrors. Say the Name William Hutson: “I had always wanted to make a track using that phrase from the Geto Boys, and we had talked about doing a Dance Mania Chicago ghetto house track about Candyman. I always liked that idea of a slow, plodding, more dance-oriented track, using that line repeated as a hook.” Daveed Diggs: “We had always talked about how that line is one of the scariest lines in rap music, it's just really good writing. Scarface does that better than anybody. What we had was this very Chicago, these really specific reference points, to me, that I had to connect. That's how I saw the challenge in my head, was like there's this very Texas lyric and this very Chicago concept. Fortunately, Candyman already does that for you. It's already about the legacy of slavery in this country. So I just got to lean into those things.” ’96 Neve Campbell (feat. Cam & China) Jonathan Snipes: “This was actually the second thing we sent them—we made an earlier beat that had a sample that we couldn't clear. We wanted to make something that sounds a little more like jerk music and something that's a little bit more tailored for them.” WH: "We didn't have our Halloween, Friday the 13th slasher song. The idea was to not have Daveed on it at all, except to rap the hooks, and just to have female rappers basically standing in for the final girl in a slasher movie. But then we liked Daveed's lines, we wanted him to keep rapping on it.” DD: “It felt too short with just two verses. We were like, ‘Well, put me on the phone and make me be the killer.’” WH: “There's a Benny the Butcher song called '’97 Hov,' this idea of referring to a song by a date and a person that's the vibe you're going for. So some of the suggestions were like, '’79 Jamie Lee Curtis' or '’82 Heather Langenkamp.' But then with Daveed on the phone and making a Scream reference, '’96 Neve Campbell' made more sense.” Something Underneath DD: “There's a whole batch of songs we recorded in New York while I was also doing a play, and so we'd work all day and then I'd go do this show at night. For a long time, there was a version of this one that I couldn't stand the vocal performance on. It's obviously a pretty technical song, and I just never nailed it and I sound tired and all of this. So it ended up being the last thing we finished.” Make Them Dead WH: “We did ‘Body & Blood’ and ‘Wriggle,’ which both take literal samples from power electronic artists and turned them into dance songs. The idea for this was, let's do a song that instead of borrows from power electronics and makes it into a dance song, let's try to just make a heavy, slow, plodding thing that feels like real power electronics.” DD: “When we finally settled on how this song should be lyrically, it was actually hard to write. Just trying to capture that same feel. There's something about power electronics that feels instructional, feels like it's ordering you to do something. The politics around it are varied, depending on who is making the stuff. But in order to sit within that, it had to feel political and instructional, but then that had to agree with us.” She Bad WH: “That's our witchcraft track.” JS: “Obviously, this ended up having some melodies in it, but it started as those, but it really is just field recordings and modular synths, and there isn't a beat so much and the melody is very obtuse in the hooks. It's mostly just looped and cut field recordings.” DD: “I've been moving away from something that we did in a lot of our previous records, like really super visual, like precise visual storytelling that feels really cinematic, where I'm just actually pointing the camera at things, so that was fun to try that again.” Invocation (Interlude) (with Greg Stuart) WH: “It's a joke about Alvin Lucier's beat pattern music, his wave songs and things like that, but done as if it was trying to summon the devil.” Pain Everyday (with Michael Esposito) DD: “I love this song so much. Also, I definitely learned while writing it why people don't write whole rap songs in 7/8. It's not easy. The math, the hidden math in those verses is intense. It kept breaking my brain, but now that it's all down, I can't hear it any other way, it sounds fine. But getting there was such a mindfuck.” WH: “So then the idea was it's in 7/8, it's about a lynched ghost, so the idea we had was a chase scene of the ghost of murdered victims of lynching.” Check the Lock WH: “This was conceived as a sequel to a song by Seagram and Scarface called ‘Sleepin in My Nikes.’ That was a rap song about extreme paranoia that I always thought was cool and felt like a horror, like an aspect of horror.” JS: “This is the one time on this album that we let ourselves do that like John Carpenter-y, creepy synth thing.” Looking Like Meat (feat Ho99o9) DD: “I think they reached out wanting to do a song, and this had always felt, we always wanted this to be like a posse track, kind of. This was another one that I wasn't going to write a voice for actually, we were going to try to find a better verse.” JS: “Which is why the hooks are all different—we were going to fill them in specifically with features, but sometimes features don't work out. This is like our attempt at making the more sort of aggressive, like a thing that sounds more like noise rap than we usually do.” WH: “The first thing on this beat was I bought 20 little music boxes that all played different songs, and I stuck them all to a sounding board and put contact microphones on it, and just cranked them each at the same time.” Eaten Alive (with Jeff Parker & Ted Byrnes) DD: “I had been in this phase of listening to Nipsey [Hussle] all day, every day, and all I wanted to do was figure out how to rap like that. So from his cadence perspective, it's like my best Nipsey impression, which we didn't know was going to turn into a posthumous tribute.” WH: “And the rapping was also partly a tribute, just spiritually a tribute to No Limit Records. That's why it's called 'Eaten Alive,' which is named after a Tobe Hooper horror movie about a swamp.” Body for the Pile (with Sickness) WH: “It already came out [in 2016]. It ended up being on an Adult Swim compilation called NOISE. We did it with Chris Goudreau, our friend who is just a legendary noise artist called Sickness.” JS: “We always thought that would be a great song to save for a horror record, and then years went by and we weren't going to include it, because we thought, ‘Well, it's out and it's done.’ We looked around and I don't know, that comp isn't really anywhere and that track is hard to find, and we really like it and we thought it fit really nice. When we started putting it in the lineup of tracks and listening to it as an album, we realized it fit really nicely.” Enlacing WH: “The cosmic pessimism of H.P. Lovecraft is all about the horror of discovering how small you are in the universe and how uncaring the universe is. So this song was about accessing that fear by getting way too high on Molly and ketamine at the same time, then discovering Cthulhu or Azathoth as a result of getting way too fucking high.” JS: “My memory is that this was never intended to be a clipping. song, that you and I made this beat as an example of, ‘Hey, we can make normal beats.’” DD: “That Lovecraftian idea was something that we played in opposition to a lot on Splendor & Misery, so it was good to revisit in a way where we were actually playing into it, and also it definitely feels to me like just being way too high.” Secret Piece WH: “We wanted to really tie the two albums together, so the idea was to get everyone who played on any of the albums to contribute their one note. So we assembled the recordings of dawn and forests, and then almost everyone who played on either of these two albums contributed one note.” JS: “We have a habit of ending our albums with a piece of processed music or contemporary music. We ended midcity with a take on a Steve Reich phased loop idea, and we ended CLPPNG with a John Cage piece, and then There Existed ends with Annea Lockwood's 'Piano Burning.' So we wanted something that felt like the sun was coming up at the end of the horror movie, a little bit.” WH: “That was the idea was that we were exiting, it's dawn in a forest. So dawn in a forest in a slasher movie or a horror movie usually means you're safe, right? The end of Friday the 13th one, the sun comes up and she's in the little boat, but that doesn't end well for her either. We did not have the jump scare at the end like Friday the 13th.” DD: “I pushed for it a little bit, but some people thought it was too corny.”