Artists of the Year Clipse Changed Themselves to Change Hip-Hop

Consequence continues our 2025 Annual Report with Clipse, our Artists of the Year. Read our interview with Pusha T and Malice below, and be sure to also check out our rankings of the 50 Best Albums of the Year, our favorite 200 Songs of 2025, and more.

" You do yourself a disservice if you try to do what the younger generation is doing," Malice tells me over Zoom. "We have lived life. We have lived experiences, and it's only right for it to come across in the music."

Malice and his brother Pusha T have grown since 2010, when their legendary hip-hop project Clipse announced a hiatus. Pusha T stretched his abilities as a solo artist. Malice forged a new relationship with God, changing his name to No Malice and back again. Both had children, and both found different answers to the question of who they are without their brother.

"My brother really respected my convictions," Malice says. "It is great to be able to work together, it is great to be able to support each other. But you are your own individual person and we respect each other as such."

When their parents died a few months apart -- mom in November of 2021, dad in March of 2022 -- Clipse reunited for a triumphant set at Pharrell Williams' Something in the Water music festival, performing a medley of old songs. Now a new question presented itself: After all that growth, what would new music sound like?

"Everything that I have suffered through allowed this to happen," Malice explains. "The lessons that I have learned, the experience allowed for me to come back."

In the interim, Pusha T had worked with several new producers, including forming and breaking a relationship with Kanye West. But as Clipse strategized their comeback, the pair returned to the man who had overseen their rise: Pharrell. "The Clipse and Pharrell always have the ability to tap into that youthful hunger," Push says.

For the album that would become one of this year's best, Let God Sort Em Out, the brothers put new levels of trust in Pharrell, who helped establish parameters for their creativity. According to Pusha T, "The boundaries in Pharrell's terms were to make sure that the flows and the verses were sticky. And with that being the case, it was all about finding a stencil and then inserting the steroids or the content of the verse: cleverness, metaphors, pain, whatever into that stencil."

"Mind you, Pharrell has been trying to get us to do this for over 20 years," Malice says. "Always encouraged us to make songs that stick." Another chance for the duo to try something new.

" It's attacked like a crossword puzzle," Pusha continues. "But usually instead of words at the time, it's melody first, melody/stencil first, and then it's making the content or the perspective fall in line with that melody. And it can be annoying, you know, bar one through eight, but by the time you get to 16 or 24, it's the greatest thing you've ever heard 'cause you've conquered it.

"I  don't even know if we should be saying this," he adds. "I don't even know if I want people to attack like this. Damn, Wren, I'm pissed," he laughs.

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.