And while there is nothing but love for Pharrell’s former collaborator in The Neptunes, Chad Hugo, the pair don’t agree with internet commenters who claim that Pharell is worse off without his old partner. “It’s difficult for me to hear, because it’s like, I know firsthand that Pharrell by himself produced Hell Hath No Fury,” Pusha T recalls of their 2006 album credited to The Neptunes. “And that’s my favorite Clipse album.”
This trust in Pharrell was paired with a new location: Recording in Paris at Louis Vuitton headquarters. Clipse found inspiration among “fashion creatives who are ultra critical all day,” and the brothers relied on them as a sounding board to get a sense for what was working and what was not. Says Pusha, “You’re watching very meticulous people nod and bop, and sometimes not. I even used them at times where me and Pharrell may differ on a beat. I’m just like, listen, man, ain’t anybody even moving to this shit, bro.”
At other times, Louis Vuitton staffers provided confirmation. The pair knew that “Birds Don’t Sing,” a song about the deaths of their parents and one of 2025’s best tracks, was working when the fashion creatives burst into tears. “They’re crying at a sketch desk, at a fabrics desk, at a shoe desk while this is being created,” Push explains.
In some ways, the work followed familiar patterns. “Pusha always gets into the studio first,” Malice explains. “For me, there has always been a pressure to never wanna be the odd man out. You know, you want to give it your all, give it your best to either surpass it, but if nothing else, at least live up to it and be comparable to it. So I think that pressure has always been on me.”
But in other senses, the duo were still evolving. One of the first tracks they presented to the public was “Chains & Whips” at a 2023 Louis Vuitton runway show; the song finds Pusha T dissing Drake associate Jim Jones, and a few tracks later, Let God Sort Em Out pulls out the Travis Scott diss “So Be It.” But by the time we speak, Push has become disenchanted with the culture of diss tracks.
“It’s kind of dead to me,” he tells me. “It’s the ransom of what a diss track used to bring: There was a clear winner. Somebody would really bow out and then that’s it — the last man standing. Now it’s just a whole bunch of noise. Even after we find winners, it’s still noise. And it’s like, man, then what’s it for?
“I’ve kind of been through that chapter and I’m over it,” he continues. “I’m somewhere right now where I don’t even want to make music with other people, nevertheless [have] anybody else in my music or be the focus of my music. What we’re doing right here [with Clipse] is, to me, so next level. I feel like the taste level is above everything else.”
Let God Sort Em Out is an album for grownups. In addition to some of Clipse’s classic themes, there’s a perspective that we really only get when we have kids ourselves, when we’re losing or have lost our parents, and we can see ourselves as part of an unbroken chain that stretches back before us and continues into a future we won’t see. The long views of middle age are rarely discussed in rap.
For Pusha T, that unbroken chain is sitting in the backseat of the car. “My son is five and he just figured it out recently,” he says of his rap career. When playing the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Birds Don’t Sing,” his son began to ask questions that caught the parents off guard. “He asked his mom, ‘Why the song so sad?’ She just called me like, ‘Oh my God, what am I supposed to say?'”
Malice had a happier realization with his children at a party. “We were in Ohio at Dave Chappelle’s house, and he was playing all of my brother’s solo music, and my son was just going crazy. I didn’t even know; he knew all the words, word for word.”
This is the freedom of the new Clipse: They are not competing with the youth or trying to hide the scars of middle age. They are simply offering what Malice calls “Clipse in real time,” with a future as likely to visit a trap house as a parent-teacher conference.
“It would be very fraudulent to come out and act in such a way that is not truly of yourself,” Malice says. They’ve changed, and to everyone’s benefit, so has the music.
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