Daveed Diggs of clipping.: Q&A

Throughout Black History Month 2025, WFUV is focusing on artists — both emerging and established — whose music we admire, both on-air with FUV Live alums and online with Q&As. Also read about Kashus Culpepper, Spellling, and Mereba.

Daveed Diggs' schedule has been stretched thin — he's been a very busy guy, juggling his rigorous parallel lives as an actor and musician. A Tony and Grammy winner for Broadway's "Hamilton," where he dazzled in the roles of Thomas Jefferson and Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, Diggs most recently stars in the critically-acclaimed film "Nickel Boys." Last year, he ended his four-year run on the TNT adaptation of the dystopian thriller "Snowpiercer."

That heavy acting schedule — and the pandemic — meant that clipping., the experimental hip hop group with rapper Diggs and producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes, hasn't had a chance to release a new album in five years, after a cascade of four releases between 2014 and 2020. That's about to change with the explosive Dead Channel Sky, the group's fifth album and perhaps most potent to date, released on Sub Pop on March 14. And not unlike the character of the homicide detective he played in the apocalyptic "Snowpiercer" (set in 2026, by the way), Diggs' chopper-paced raps in clipping. adroitly seize upon dark themes with sci-fi, horrorcore, and cyberpunk fervor, made even profoundly relevant with today's aggressive encroachment of AI and the pervasive zeitgeist of global peril.

Special guests on Dead Channel Sky include Aesop Rock ("Welcome Home, Warrior), Nels Cline, Bitpanic, Tia Nomore, and Cartel Madras, and clipping. will embark on a West Coast tour later this spring, vaulting from the album's release.

FUV caught up with Diggs over email to ask him how he, Hutson, Snipes pulled together some of Dead Channel Sky — and what fans can anticipate when it comes to the group's fiery live sets:

You've described hip hop as an art form that's a "direct conversation with the times." Where is clipping. coming into that dialogue-of-these-times right now, and what ideas were most important to you, William Hutson and Jonathon Snipes with Dead Channel Sky?

The idea for Dead Channel Sky was to create a mixtape-like project from the future that the cyberpunk fiction of the '80s and '90s predicted. 'Side, we are currently living in that future; what it kind of ends up being is a meditation on our present via the ideas, hopes, and fears of our past. Not sure how useful any of that is. But I think what was most important to us was to tap in to the energy, both sonic and lyrical, of that genre and that scene and that time and see what it feels like now.

"Change the Channel" is a brutal, thrilling track with an artillery-fire rap from you. The video has a hell of a lot to say too. How did that track — and lyrics — come about?

We knew we wanted to do something that felt like The Prodigy. I’m pretty sure that’s how we started. And we also wanted something new and super high energy to start playing at shows. We hadn’t made a mosh pit appropriate song in a while, but the kids at the shows seem to want to mosh anyway. And in terms of the story, we had been discussing that the world of this album is one where wars are taking place all over but unless you are directly fighting in them, you are probably not aware of how they affect you (sound familiar?). And some of these songs should be from the perspective of soldiers in these wars who are not totally aware what they are fighting for, but they have orders and they follow them to the best of their abilities.

Clipping.'s production approach is phenomenal — you all throw a lot of ideas into each track, but you also have some self-imposed constraints (like avoiding first person in your lyrics). Was there any particular track on Dead Channel Sky that was especially challenging for the three of you to get just right ... and why?

“Dominator” was tough. We don’t often work with samples, in part because they are really difficult to clear. That one was no exception. So we went thru a bunch of iterations to see if we could come up with up with alternatives. It was also tricky to get the hook on that song to feel hype enough. And then I also wrote a third verse that was incredibly hard to record. There were many many takes of that one.

With clipping.'s tour ahead — what are you guys plotting for the live show that might be different from past performances? Over the years, have you formulated a certain character for clipping., as you would with a play or film? Or is that clipping. frontman closer to who you are?

We have found that the best way to perform this music is to just pretend that all of these songs are totally reasonable things to play at a party. So we are all pretty close to ourselves onstage. I don’t take on some scary persona just because the songs are often horrific. We let the sound palette and the energy do the work and just try to have a good time. The shows are great. The audiences keep growing (much to our surprise) and we do our best to curate a pretty sonically intense — but still really fun — experience.

Is there a particular non-profit cause or organization that means a lot to you, especially in 2025, and why?

I’ve been doing some work with Brady: United Against Gun Violence. I have a young child. The reality that he is going to have to experience active shooter drills in school breaks my heart. There are a number of proven, common sense solutions to this problem that continue to be ignored.

- Daveed Diggs
February 2025