Clipping. - Wriggle (Expanded) (LP)

Some records still sound like a dare. Clipping’s Wriggle always did, and Wriggle (Expanded) only sharpens the point. The Los Angeles trio of Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes first dropped the EP in 2016 during the Hamilton whirlwind that made Diggs a household name, but nothing here plays for the mainstream. The 2020 expanded edition on Sub Pop gathers the original cuts with extra material and remixes, then slams the door behind you. It is short, rude, and wildly precise, the sort of release that reminds you how potent a tightly focused idea can be.

The title track is still a rush. Built around a savage sample from Whitehouse’s Wriggle Like a Fucking Eel, it drags the vocabulary of power electronics onto a club floor and dares it to dance. Hutson and Snipes splinter the source into a twitchy engine, all serrated overtones and clipped percussion, then give Diggs a thin ledge to sprint across. He raps in tight, flinty bursts, crowding internal rhymes into gleeful taunts, his voice a snare crack cutting through the noise. It should collapse. Instead it levitates. You can draw a straight line from early industrial pranksters to this, but Clipping make it feel new, fun and a little dangerous.

Shooter remains the conceptual knockout. The producers limit themselves to gunshot sounds as drums, stacking casings, slides, blasts and echoes into a stark beat, then leave Diggs to work through scenes where every bar changes the angle of fire. It is a technical flex, sure, but also a critique that lands without lecturing. The wordplay is dense, the flow is crisp, and the chorus rings like a siren. When critics singled out Shooter on release, they were right. Few rap tracks pull off a formal gambit that cleanly.

The guests give the record its party streak, grimy as it is. Back Up throws Antwon and Signor Benedick the Moor into a mosh pit of blown-out kicks and strafing synths, each verse swaggering over static. Our Time ropes in Memphis veteran La Chat, whose presence alone shifts the air. She brings that 90s spine, cool and lethal, while the beat nods to Southern trunk-rattle filtered through Clipping’s sandblaster. Hot Fuck No Love is pure heat, a sweat-drenched tumble with Cakes da Killa that proves the group can be raunchy and playful without easing off the sonics. The chemistry is palpable. These are not novelty features. They are well chosen voices who can meet the production at full tilt.

What the expanded edition adds is context and plenty of grit around the edges. The sequencing feels like a better map of the world these songs built, and the bonus material sits like alternate doorways into the same warehouse. You hear how Hutson and Snipes love texture, from scorched feedback to tiny room tones that act like glue. Nothing is tossed off. Even the nastiest sounds are placed like jewellery, bright and sharp.

It helps to remember who is at the desk. Hutson and Snipes are lifelong sound designers as much as producers, with film scores and installation work under their belts, and it shows. They understand space, decay and the physics of loudness. Diggs, who nabbed both a Tony and a Grammy for Hamilton in 2016, uses that stage-honed breath control to thread needles most emcees would not see. He can go double time without smudging consonants, then switch to a conversational mutter that sets up the next strike. The trio’s no-adlibs, no-comfort approach on early records still guides them here, but Wriggle is also a reminder that they like to move bodies while they melt speakers.

If you collect Clipping vinyl, you probably already know this EP hits different through a good system. The low end chews, the high end hisses like a pressure valve, and the negative space feels alive. Wriggle vinyl copies pop up now and then, and it pairs nicely on the shelf with CLPPNG and Splendor and Misery if you are curating Clipping albums on vinyl. For local diggers, I have stumbled across copies in the odd Melbourne record store, and plenty of shops that deal in vinyl records Australia will ship it if you buy Clipping records online. However you get it, this set belongs in the fast lane, filed under records that turn the room on its axis.

What makes Wriggle endure is that it sounds like a party and a provocation at once. The expanded edition does not sand off any edges. It opens a few more wounds, then hands you the salt. In a catalogue that now includes two acclaimed horror-rap full lengths, this remains their most immediate sugar rush. Put it on, turn it up, and let the floorboards complain.