Grammys 2026: Clipse's 'Let God Sort Em Out' is a Study in Control, Chaos, and Consequence: Album Review

CREDIT: CLIPSE

Stand-out tracks: "Chains & Whips" "P.O.V." "F.I.C.O."

Our favorites: "All Things Considered" "By The Grace of God"

Release date: July 11, 2025

Label: ROC Nation Distribution

For fans of: Pharrell Williams, Kendrick Lamar, Tyler, The Creator

Grammys Album of the Year prediction: Won't win

Clipse have never been loud for the sake of volume. Their power is found in their restraint, and Let God Sort Em Out distills that ethos to its sharpest edge, using deceptively simple production and razor-precise wordplay to map the contradictions of the human experience: survival and guilt, faith and fatalism, pain and providence.

From the jump, the album announces its thesis with chilling clarity. “The Birds Don’t Sing” opens stripped nearly to the bone, allowing space for meaning to echo. John Legend’s silk-soft vocals float through the chorus, but they don’t soothe, they haunt, echoing repeated: “The birds don’t sing / They screech in pain.” Reframing innocence as illusion, the outro by Voices of Fire feels like a gentle hand on the shoulder, a reminder that love, and real love at that, often shows itself not in grand gestures but in presence, in simplicity, in staying.

That restraint snaps into sharper tension on “Chains & Whips,” where intentionally minimal production becomes a pressure chamber. Kendrick Lamar steps in not solely as a featured artist, but as an accelerant, sharpening the track’s cultural and political edge. The song dissects generational cycles with surgical precision, refusing sentimentality in favor of accountability. Chains are inherited, and breaking that cycle requires a clarity that hurts before it heals.

“P.O.V.” arrives with a regal confidence, unapologetic in its posture. Tyler, The Creator’s domineering presence amplifies the track’s central question of what are we actually owed from our success. “I’ve topped all these lists / Where my prize at?” isn’t a boast so much as a reckoning. In a culture obsessed with metrics, Clipse expose the emptiness that can follow achievement when meaning isn’t part of the equation.

While the album shines brightest in its collaborations, the connective tissue between them is just as vital. Tracks like “So Be It,” “Ace Trumpets,” and “M.T.B.T.T.F.” feature agile wordplay, sometimes playful, sometimes brutal, but always purposeful. This is where Clipse articulates the album’s core tension: the double-edged sword of human existence, where pain and serendipity coexist, and where the balance between what we can control and what we can’t ultimately shapes who we become.

“All Things Considered” briefly softens the project’s hard edges, drifting into a dreamier reflection. That calm is short-lived, though, as “F.I.C.O.” cuts back in with unfiltered clarity, confronting money, debt, and classism without flinching. There’s no rationalization here - just observation, delivered plainly enough to be undeniable.

Pharrell’s fingerprints are all over the album, not in excess but in intention. His production choices allow the lyrics to do the heavy lifting, giving the project its most resonant moments. Across the album, the recurring line “This is culturally inappropriate” morphs with context, shifting meaning track by track. By the time the forty-minute journey closes, those four words feel like the album's mission statement.

The record ends with “By The Grace of God,” deceptively light in tone. Beneath that softness lies the weight of survival. There’s an unspoken sense of survivor’s guilt here—the idea that making it through life intact, having tasted joy or success, can feel like both blessing and burden. Victory isn’t always triumphant. Sometimes it’s just endurance. Sometimes it’s gratitude laced with grief.

Let God Sort Em Out is a testament to the power of saying less and meaning more. Through disciplined wordplay and intentional simplicity, Clipse capture the contradictions that define being human.

GRAMMY FOR ALBUM OF THE YEAR

Clipse last released an album in 2009. The music landscape has shifted a lot since then. The world has shifted a lot since then. What Clipse has masterfully done is carried their old sonic and their own artistic choices into a new era with the precision and unwavering confidence that is needed in a comeback album. Let God Sort Em Out definitely wows, but there's also an air of simplicity that, while it's intentional, stops this album from being more impressive than it's fellow nominees.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CLIPSE:

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