There Existed An Addiction To Blood, Clipping’s new album, is a meditation on the idea of horror — horror movies, horror stories, ’90s horrorcore rap. On the different album tracks, Diggs lays out different gruesome movie scenarios. Rich people pay piles of money to watch poor people die horribly. Someone hides from mysterious pursuers in a dumpster. A tryst becomes a bloodbath. We’ve heard stories like this before, but that doesn’t make them any less unsettling. And Diggs lays these stories out with bloodthirsty delight, zooming in on detail, digging into the texture of the viscera: “A signal fire in the lymbic nerves / Gotta give the kill what the kill deserves.” “The bags on the table ain’t for weight, they for body parts / Victim’s skin stretched across the wall, call it body art.” “Steve was still there on the floor, what was left of him / Gnarled bone, body parts, all piled in a mess.”
Diggs lays all this out with breathless speed and precision, and he does everything he can to put us, the listeners, in the shoes of the victims. He mostly raps in second person: You’re watching your friends die, you’re careening blindly into an alleyway, you’re invited to imagine the most painful death for your victim: “Tendon saw to extend a cavity / What could fit? What are you imagining?” It’s cold, unrelenting, stomach-contracting music, and it directly targets or implicates the “you” who happens to be listening.
| A1 | Nothing Is Safe | 4:57 |
| A2 | He Dead | 4:22 |
| A3 | La Mala Ordina | 5:46 |
| B1 | Club Down | 4:31 |
| B2 | Run For Your Life | 4:52 |
| B3 | The Show | 3:05 |
| B4 | All In Your Head | 4:30 |
| C1 | Blood Of The Fang | 4:40 |
| C2 | Story 7 | 3:41 |
| C3 | Attunement | 4:47 |
| D | Piano Burning | 18:01 |
