Photo by Tom Spray

This thing’s a mess, isn’t it? “Birds”-- the first new Death Grips tune to arrive since they did not-- is a surrealistic madhouse, with synthesizers that suggest the Doppler effect, a hook manipulated until it sounds like a didgeridoo, and an instrumental impasse that puts Pops Staples’ guitar in a blender. What’s most conspicuous, though, is MC Ride’s narcotized delivery of strangely elliptical thoughts. “I’ve got a black hat/ It might live,” he half-murmurs, half-slurs. “It’s got a black hat/ It goes big.”

He sounds tired but tough, fending off combatants with vague and hilarious threats: “One bird, two birds, three birds, four/ Fuck you think I fuck this for.” The inscrutability fits the track’s discursive structure. Death Grips mostly pushes aside its expected power quakes for drums severed from their source and guitars that lazily cycle through several little loops. In that way, “Birds” recalls the organized madness of Death Grips’ debut Exmilitary, or before their square peg was somehow supposed to fit into a major label’s round hole.