Clipping. - Splendor & Misery (LP)

Clipping.’s Splendor & Misery arrived on 9 September 2016 through Sub Pop and still feels like the rare hip hop record that builds a whole universe you can step into, then get a little lost in. It is a tight, unnerving Afrofuturist story set in deep space, told through Daveed Diggs’ quicksilver flow and the eerie, hyper-detailed production of William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. Fresh from the spotlight of Hamilton, Diggs leans hard into character here, playing a prisoner turned pilot, Cargo 2331, who seizes a slave ship and hurtles into the unknown while the ship’s computer becomes his only companion. That premise earned the album a 2017 Hugo Award nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form, which says a lot about the care that went into the world building.

The record sounds like oxygen hissing from a cracked valve, a beacon ping in a lightless corridor, the thud of a hull under stress. Clipping. have long treated noise as percussion and here they push that idea further, swapping out comfort for texture and scale. The opener Long Way Away starts like a spiritual that drifted through a cosmic radio, setting the album’s moral weather with a simple melody and a lot of foreboding. The Breach sketches the breakout with clipped commands and a computerised narrator that feels at once helpful and untrustworthy. When Baby Don’t Sleep hits, the lights are flashing. It is a brutal, minimalist banger that rattles like a loose panel. All Black feels like orbit stabilised, the darkness becoming a kind of refuge, Diggs firing off images of procedure and survival while the beat stays skeletal and cold.

True Believer offers one of the record’s most moving turns, pulling in the cadence of gospel and the call and response of work songs. It is not pastiche, it is context, and it ties the album’s far future to a history that is still very present. The refrain from Long Way Away keeps reappearing like a memory that refuses to fade, catching on new meanings with each pass. By the time A Better Place closes things out, the story finds its uneasy grace. You are not handed resolution so much as a horizon. It feels right for a record about survival and myth.

Hutson and Snipes both have deep roots in experimental sound and film audio, and you can hear that craft in the way space is used. Voices sit inside rooms that seem to expand and contract. Alarms feel three dimensional. Even the silences have shape. It is a producer’s album in the best sense, though it never turns into a tech demo. Diggs is the anchor. His diction is surgical, and his timing gives even the most abstract passages a human pulse. He can sprint, but he also knows when to leave air for the story to breathe.

Plenty of outlets heard the ambition and responded. NPR ran an early First Listen and zeroed in on the narrative scope. Pitchfork praised how the trio tethered sci fi imagery to America’s past and present, avoiding easy metaphor. Fans have turned certain moments into touchstones, especially All Black and Baby Don’t Sleep, which still land hard live. If you have seen them in a small room, you know how those sub bass drops suck the sound out of your chest.

On vinyl the album really opens up. The spare low end and those brittle high frequencies need room, and the Sub Pop pressing gives you clean detail without sanding off the grit. If you are hunting for Clipping. vinyl at a Melbourne record store, or trawling for vinyl records Australia wide, Splendor & Misery vinyl is a rewarding pickup. It sits neatly next to Shabazz Palaces and Death Grips, but it also earns a corner of the shelf on its own as a strange little opera that plays by its own rules. If you prefer to buy Clipping. records online, keep an eye out for restocks because Clipping. albums on vinyl do not linger long.

What makes this one stick is how it treats science fiction as a living archive. The ship’s computer and the human at its centre are locked in a complicated dance, and the production keeps that tension alive without theatrical excess. It is a record about solitude and systems, about finding a voice where you are not meant to have one. Eight years on, it has not dulled. If anything, the questions it asks about power and memory feel sharper. Put it on at night, lights low, and let that first transmission cut through. The journey still feels dangerous, and strangely hopeful.