Pusha T and Malice Reunite as Clipse, With Vengeance on Their Minds

For over two decades, Pusha T and Malice — the Virginia brothers who make up the rap duo Clipse — have tended to a very specific corner of hip-hop. As a unit and apart, they have been the purists, the moralists, the keepers of a traditionalist flame that lies perilously close to nostalgia, but somehow remains alive with possibility. While the genre has iterated countless times around and beside them, the pair remained faithful to a subject (drug dealing) and a style (ice pick-sharp minimalism) that might not have made them superstars, but has cemented them as a connoisseur’s pick, immune to trends.

“Let God Sort Em Out,” out July 11, is the fourth Clipse studio album and first since 2009. Produced in full by Pharrell Williams, a longtime collaborator and benefactor, it is like a familiar cold plunge: harsh, reassuring, invigorating. The LP is a clear continuation of the work they did in the 2000s that made them favorites of street-rap realists and internet-fueled curio seekers.

But the duo has also focused its single-minded pugnaciousness, turning it into a refined marketing savvy. For years, Clipse’s commitment to form and code has put them at odds with key figures in the genre. The most recent is Travis Scott, rap’s big-tent carnival barker, whom Pusha T calls on the carpet on a new single, “So Be It.”

Once cordial acquaintances in the Kanye West universe, the two diverged following an incident in Paris, when Scott premiered new music for Clipse and Pharrell while withholding that he was collaborating with Drake, a known foe. “That was corny,” Pusha T said recently in an interview for Popcast, The New York Times’s music podcast. “He’s shameless.”

Pusha T’s long-running feud with Drake — it was he who announced to the world, in “The Story of Adidon,” from 2018, that Drake had a son — has hovered over much of the music Pusha T has released in the last few years.