Let God Sort Em Out: A Review
Image Credit: Clipse
After fifteen years, Malice and Pusha T return not to relive the past, but refine it. Even the title—an old maxim traced through centuries of ruthlessness—signals their stance: Clipse will make the music as they know it, and let the judgment fall where it may.
From Virginia Beach, the Thornton brothers reached the apex of coke rap in the mid-to-late 2000s with Hell Hath No Fury and Til the Casket Drops. Their verses were pinpoint and unsentimental, and their cool so composed it made moral ambiguity read like certainty. With The Neptunes’ chrome-and-concrete minimalism underneath, they turned austerity into luxury.
Their 2010 split wasn’t just professional, it was existential. Pusha signed to Ye’s G.O.O.D. Music and honed immaculate antagonism (his beefs with Drake and Travis Scott come to mind). Malice—seeing friends indicted and fearing for his brother —found Christianity and stepped back from the spectacle. They return sounding both wiser and world-worn. The heat that once flashed through lines like “playas get chosed and snitches get dead” has cooled into measure and consequence. The anger isn’t extinguished so much as metabolized. This record looks inward—not for absolution, but for understanding.
Produced entirely by Pharrell, the album’s palette is steel and negative space. The drums are polished and dry, and melodies are intentionally skeletal, setting the stage for Pusha and Malice’s verses. Without Chad Hugo’s extraterrestrial sparkle, the old Neptunes futurism congeals into something monolithic—less bounce, more intent. Pharrell sounds older here too; the mischievous edges are replaced by a stern restraint. Malice names it outright: “Ain’t no more Neptunes, so P’s Saturn.” In an era optimized for snippets, these beats resist extraction and reward front-to-back listening.
The opener, “The Birds Don’t Sing,” is a symphonic purge. John Legend’s heartfelt chorus sets a gray sky as the brothers grieve both parents without varnish. Malice’s reflections on his father carry extra weight – he credits a deacon’s blessing for bringing him back to rap. It plays as both mourning ritual and mission statement.
“So Be It” crystallizes the album’s central tension. Over Pharrell’s hypnotic loop—a Talal Maddah violin line floating above sparse, thudding 808s—the brothers confront the costs of their choices. The song picked up headlines for Pusha’s cold dismantling of Travis Scott (“Calabasas took your bitch and your pride in front of me”), yet it’s bigger than the jab. It’s two artists weaponizing their contradictions: Pusha, hip-hop’s consummate antagonist and Malice, a man at peace who won’t pretend he’s forgotten.
The album’s hard line is clearest on “Chains & Whips,” reportedly the track that cost them their Def Jam deal. Over an organ-heavy beat reinforced by Lenny Kravitz’s guitar, Kendrick Lamar delivers a blistering verse that braids slavery’s legacy to modern materialism. His “gen”-based wordplay is a clinic—tackling generational cycles and concluding, “Let’s be clear, hip-hop died again / Half of my profits may go to Rakim.” It’s show-stealing and gives the record real political weight.
Features are surgical, not gratuitous. On the off-kilter “P.O.V.,” Tyler, The Creator taps a Goblin-era darkness, wrestling with outgrowing his heroes—a sharp foil to Malice’s ice-cold confession: “Came back for the money, that’s the Devil in me.” Malice’s hiatus didn’t blunt him. If anything, his bars are cleaner, his delivery more devastating for how measured it is. “F.I.C.O.” sets Stove God Cooks’ folk-tinged hook against subwoofer punishment; Malice again slices through with clinical precision. Nas lends mafioso poise to the title track, and Ab-Liva closes “Inglorious Bastards” with the grain and grit only a day-one can provide, DJ Clue punctuating what feels like a final summation of their long-running case.
The evolution is stark against their earlier work. Where “Dirty Money” luxuriated in excess, “E.B.I.T.D.A.” tallies the costs with forensic clarity. The wordplay remains surgical, but the blade is turned inward—less intimidation, more inventory.
This isn’t a comeback, it’s a reckoning. Self-released with Roc Nation handling distribution after they bought out their major-label contract, the album arrives unfiltered and unsupervised, mirrored by stark black-and-white visuals that match its sonic austerity. Both brothers convert biography into craft: Pusha distinguishes winning from surviving, while Malice finds a language honest enough to hold his past. Together, they deliver a rarity—a mature rap album that sacrifices nothing.
Let God Sort ’Em Out works because it refuses easy redemption arcs. It offers something harder and more valuable: the sound of two artists willing to let their mess become their message. In an era of staged authenticity, Clipse give you the real thing—scarred, seasoned, and absolutely uncompromising.