How Pusha T and Malice Resurrected the Clipse After 14 Years
In Norfolk, Virginia, a medium-size city teeming with unassuming single--family homes and townhouses, Pusha T’s contemporary pad looks airlifted from the Hollywood Hills. With a waterfront view, large glass windows inviting in natural light, and state-of-the-art interior design, it’s as if the architects asked him for inspiration and the self-proclaimed merchant of “high-taste level, luxury, drug raps” gave them a playlist of his songs.
He greets me at the door wearing a black Tiffany & Co. football jersey and fuzzy black Louis Vuitton boot slippers — the newly appointed Louis Vuitton brand ambassador is repping his old friend Pharrell Williams’ spring/summer ’24 collection strong. While walking the sprawling home’s wood-panel floors, I’m being vetted by his dog, Widdle, though Pusha, 47, has his doubts about Widdle’s commitment to the job: “You not barking?” he says to his pet in mock disappointment. When we get to the dining room, he invites me to share some catered West Indian food with his manager, Kevin, and his photographer, Brendan, as we wait for his brother, Malice, 52, to arrive at the house.
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The conversation is casual as I munch on oxtail, macaroni and cheese, and cabbage — it’s so good that I’d have gotten seconds if I didn’t have to do an interview right afterward. Pusha talks about his favorite part of New York (Brooklyn Heights, because of its architecture and walkability) and his daily routine of running and taking early-morning calls starting at 5:30 a.m. After about 20 minutes, Malice shows up. The energy stays light as he gives everyone a pound and sits at the long dining table. Kevin jokes with him about breaking his strict diet to grab some jerk chicken and oxtail, but Malice isn’t partaking. “No, I’m ready” for the interview, he says.
Malice’s resolve is the reason I’m here in the first place. After 15 long years, the Clipse — the duo of Gene Thornton, a.k.a. Malice, and Terrence Thornton, a.k.a. Pusha T — are back together, with a new album due later this year. The fans who have spent that time clamoring for more of their raw, reflective street tales will be happy with Let God Sort Em Out, which picks up where 2002’s Lord Willin’, 2006’s Hell Hath No Fury, and 2009’s Til the Casket Drops left off. Back then, the Thornton brothers rode the Neptunes’ entrancing synths and bouncy drums better than anyone, creating rap staples like “Mr. Me Too” and “Popular Demand.”
“Grindin’,” a left-of-center single from their first album, became the Clipse’s breakthrough hit, with a beat that kids around the country banged out on lunchroom tables and a compelling depiction of the Virginia drug trade from two distinct perspectives. While Pusha bragged, “Call me Sub-woofer, ’cause I pump bass like that,” Malice started off the third verse rhyming, “My grind’s ’bout family, never been about fame/Them days I wasn’t able, there was always ’caine.” If Push was the unrepentant flexer of rewind-worthy drug boasts, Malice was the conscience. Together, their inventive wordplay, nuanced story-telling, and holistic perspective on the underworld set them apart from one-note street rappers and gained them widespread respect from peers.
But even with an undeniable musical package, they faced label woes that infamously caused a four-year delay between Lord Willin’ and Hell Hath No Fury as they fought to get off Jive Records. Their We Got It 4 Cheap mixtape series made them cult heroes on the burgeoning rap internet in the meantime, yet both men grew dissatisfied with the industry, and their time on the shelf also affected those around them. “Everybody falls victim to the industry,” Pusha recalls. “Not just the group. Now it’s your homeboy, it’s your road manager. At that time, everybody went back to what they knew.”
By the time of Til the Casket Drops, Malice’s disillusionment with the industry had intensified. He was also dealing with mental-health challenges, spurred in part by a health scare in which he became convinced that he had somehow contracted HIV. “When you feel like your life may be in jeopardy, everything comes clear,” he says now.
To compound his qualms, the Thornton brothers’ friends (and their then-manager, Anthony “Geezy” Gonzalez) began to be rounded up on drug charges, hitting too close to home. “It was story, after story, after story,” Malice tells me. One of their friends, he says, was arrested outside a hospital while wheeling out his girlfriend and their newborn child. Another had the cops crash into him on the interstate, with his daughter in the car, and arrest him. “[They were] picking up everybody,” Malice says. “We talking on the phone: ‘Yo, heard about so-and-so?’ ”
So Malice began to worry when Pusha was uncharacteristically late to a flight out of Norfolk International Airport circa 2010. “I’m on the plane and my brother wasn’t on the plane, and we about to take off, and I couldn’t even imagine him being late,” he says. He prayed for Pusha’s arrival. When Pusha finally boarded, just before the plane doors were set to close, Malice stood up on the crowded plane and emphatically told his brother that he was quitting the Clipse.
“Many people didn’t understand why I would do something like that,” Malice reflects now. Though much was made of his renewed devotion to Christianity at the time, he says he didn’t seek to push his worldview on anyone else. “It was only because of what I saw, what it meant to me,” he continues. “I never condemned anybody else. This was totally about me.”
Pusha says that he was fine with his brother’s decision. “I respect my brother so much that I was just like, ‘All right,’ ” he says. “I’m a solution-based person. There’s no roadblock that you put in front of me that I’m never going to try to look around. And more importantly, I cared about how he felt. If that’s what he felt like, it wasn’t for me to try to change his mind.”
THE DAY BEFORE that interview, I meet the Thornton brothers at a studio in Virginia Beach where they tell me they’ve recorded for years. It’s a big room with brown walls, black foam pads, and speakers so loud that their manager’s Apple Watch warns of an unhealthy decibel level. Over three hours of talking with them individually and listening to Let God Sort Em Out, I pick up on their similar-ities and differences. They both talk with their hands. They’re both thoughtful about how they answer questions, sometimes pausing and peering into the distance as if they’re -pulling the perfect sentence out of a void. Each man has big, expressive eyes that -punctuate his answers, but their wide-eyed glares -radiate different emotions. Pusha’s glare is exuberant and often comes with a smile. Malice’s is piercing.
Push, clad in a white T-shirt, blue shorts, a gold watch, and Adidas sneakers, tells me that he was aware of what was happening to their friends back in the late 2000s. But when I ask if he shared his brother’s concerns about potential legal peril, he’s succinct.
“I didn’t feel shit,” he says. “At that time, I was like I am with everything else: by any means necessary. We going to keep hammering this music out. We’re awesome, and it’s going to work itself out. It wasn’t going to exhaust me worrying about it. Fuck that shit, I’m still going to [NBA] All-Star weekend. I’m still going to blow this money.”
Pusha had been envisioning solo moves for years. He rhymes me some lines from his “Chevy Ridin High” remix, from 2006: “If he claimed king and he claimed best, then I guess you can call me God/There’s none higher, none flyer.” At the time, his mindset was “I know y’all don’t get to hear me that much, but goddamn it, I’m better” than the rap competition. After having a major hand in Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sessions in Hawaii and signing a solo deal with GOOD Music in the fall of 2010, he was ready to prove it.
Back home in Virginia, Malice sought to figure out his next steps after leaving the industry behind. “I didn’t know how bills was getting paid,” he says. “I didn’t know how [my] house was going to stand. I ain’t know nothing.” He remembers a prayer from those days: “God, if your word is true, then you got to do this.” He released Wretched, Pitiful, Poor, Blind, and Naked, a memoir detailing his journey from crisis to Christianity, in 2011; two years later, he released his debut solo album, Hear Ye Him, with a new stage name — No Malice — and a strict adherence to spiritually tinged lyrics. He announced the name change on Twitter with a video that showed him at a funeral for his old self, shaking his head at a casket-bound clone. In 2017, looking back on the music he’d made as part of the Clipse, he pondered aloud: “How many people went to jail listening to the things that I said?”
Looking back now, he remembers this as a time when he wanted to share his testimony with the masses. He tells me he still gets DMs from those who resonate with his story. “A lot of things that you experience ain’t even got nothing to do with you,” he says. “It’s just that you may be able to handle it better than other people. And then you can help those who are going through the things that you had to go through the fire about.”
He adds that the spiritual searching of this era was rooted in an innate curiosity. “What’s going on in life, really?” he says. “I needed a real answer. I was never one to just flow.”
In the early Nineties, years before the Clipse’s rap fame, Malice had enlisted in the Army after high school, taking a different path than his friends who were delving into the streets. “I think my dad gave me that example,” he recalls. “He joined the Air Force at a young age, and it was something concrete that I could count on until I could figure out what I was going to do. At the time, it made the most sense.” When I ask him how that decision paralleled his later choice to leave the Clipse, he says, “I feel very fortunate to have been able to understand the path that I was on, especially now with seeing the downfall of people who get consumed by a lifestyle, and it takes control of them. It can happen to anyone. When sin goes unchecked, it can lead to anywhere.”
The entertainment world is full of stars who have publicly given their life to Christ. Sometimes that commitment is well-meaning, but they fall off due to temptation; at other times, it seems more like a ploy for money or publicity. But Malice’s belief feels like the real deal. As on-the-nose as it sounds, parts of our conversation feel like a sermon. He has a powerful delivery, stretching and emphasizing words in a way that feels pulpit-ready, and he tells me he’s delivered many eulogies. He reads the Bible every morning. “I find the Bible to answer everything to my satisfaction,” he says. “As intelligent as I might think that I am, that Word satisfies me perfectly.”
Even so, he’s going back to his past life in one symbolic way: This summer, after announcing the new Clipse album, he subtly changed his name back to Malice on Instagram.
“I like the name Malice better,” he tells me with a smile. “That’s who the Clipse is — Malice and Pusha.”
In all seriousness, he adds that his beliefs transcend a stage name. “When I changed my name to No Malice, I was making a statement,” he says. “There were things that needed to be said, lessons that needed to be learned. And I know exactly who I am. I have been cut to the heart. I am a new creation. I see things different, and I am able to assume any name I choose for myself.”
“What’s going on in life, really?” Malice asked himself. “I needed a real answer. I was never one to just flow.”
IN THEIR YOUNGER YEARS, the Clipse found themselves in surroundings where certain corners contained life-or-death decisions. Pusha T has depicted that lifestyle so prosperously that now, every corner on his first floor contains a healthy plant or enough toys to stock an aisle at Toys R Us. He calls the home a “playland” for his four-year-old son, Nigel. A cleaning lady bounces around on an upper floor while we talk, the day after the studio visit. Behind me, a window holds a shimmering view of the Lafayette River.
The two brothers share several laughs during our conversation in Pusha’s home. Pusha tells me about being younger and knowing that he could easily annoy Malice by tainting his cache of rap posters and rhyme books. Malice recalls Pusha messing up a Run-D.M.C. poster he had. But Push wouldn’t outright rip them up or draw on them.
“It was just a bend,” Pusha says. “Anything to throw off that pristine [condition].”
“But now he does the same thing,” Malice says. “Because all his notebooks, they got to be pristine! He’ll write something and get a brand-new notebook, write again.”
Hearing this, Pusha runs upstairs and returns with about six legal pads in his hand. He shows me one tablet with a page listing songs and artists that served as creative inspiration for Let God Sort Em Out. Then he shows me a notebook with his verse for the new Clipse song “Birds Don’t Sing” written out in his graffiti--esque handwriting on the very first page. Sure enough, the rest of the pad is empty beyond that.
Pusha’s solo debut album, My Name Is My Name, released in 2013, was a critical success that proved he could stand alone, and it reflected a new sense of creative freedom he’d been looking for. While the Neptunes were meticulous about melody and song structure, Kanye’s experimental nature lined up with Push’s urge to “make mixtape music.” He says there were two important junctures in his career as a vocalist: Hell Hath No Fury, and My Name Is My Name’s “Numbers on the Boards,” where he talks filthy over a churning loop co-crafted by Don Cannon, Kanye, and 88-Keys.
He’s since released three more albums: 2015’s King Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude, which was released the same year he was named GOOD Music’s president; 2018’s Daytona, dropped amid a contentious beef with Drake; and 2022’s Grammy-nominated It’s Almost Dry. That last album, in his eyes, was another chance to prove his superiority to all rap competitors. ”I make the best music with Kanye, and I make the best music with Pharrell,” he says.
For Malice, “nothing was surprising” about Pusha’s solo ascendance. “While he was out doing his thing, we just rooting for him,” he says, adding that he “covered him in prayer.” Malice speaks for many when he lauds his brother as someone who upholds “the codes” of hip-hop and embodies “the thoroughness of a MC.”
Yet as his solo career progressed, Pusha says, he began to feel strongly that his brother’s presence was missing not just beside him, but from the rap landscape at large. He’d see comments online about how fans missed his brother’s “super real” perspective about the drug game. “I was like, ‘I got to make sure that I incorporate some of that shit,’ ” he recalls. “And it never quite lands, me trying to be like him. I’m like, ‘Man, I get exactly what y’all miss.’ ”
While they received numerous lucrative offers to reunite over the years, Malice just wasn’t ready. “The money wasn’t comforting to my soul,” he says. He felt like he needed a “firm confirmation” spiritually before jumping back in the booth. “And I would have to have strength in knowing that I could handle what comes with it,” he adds.
In 2019, the brothers collaborated for the first time in nearly a decade, traveling to Wyoming to write for Kanye West’s Jesus Is King album. Malice looks upon their time at the compound fondly, recalling days spent with his brother as well as time in church with Kanye. Push was more frustrated by the songwriting process at Kanye’s writing camp, and says he was almost sent home for his “bad -attitude.”
“It’s a lot of different influences out there,” Push says. “You’re trying to write from a perspective of where you think he’s at. You keep it as cool as you think is possible, and think you’re getting the point across proper.” Then, he says, Kanye would “come through, nix it.”
As an example, he says that Kanye took back the song “Follow God” after he and Malice had recorded to it; on the original song, Pusha had planned to reveal that he was about to become a father.
“He gave us the beat,” Pusha says. “Forgot about the beat. We working on the records. We probably laid something to it.”
“We laid it,” Malice confirms.
“Kanye was like, ‘I need that back.’”
Though the “Follow God” fiasco frustrated Push, and Malice agrees that there were “too many chefs in the kitchen,” Malice says it was the first time that the door opened to the possibility of a new Clipse album. In the end, they left Wyoming with “Use This Gospel,” the first Clipse song in years.
A handful of collaborations followed, including Malice giving his brother one of 2022’s verses of the year on “I Pray for You,” from It’s Almost Dry. The potent, extended verse felt reminiscent of the Clipse at their peak, with Malice rhyming, “I greet you with the love of God/That don’t make us friends.”
Malice says he was still grappling with the idea of a full-time return to rap at the time. Ultimately, he says, he came to feel that this song was “something I could do without compromising my convictions.”
IN NOVEMBER 2021, the Thornton brothers lost their mother. While they were still grieving her, their father passed, just three months later. “It’s been tough,” Push reflects. “You never really get used to it. The only soothing feeling that I get out of it is knowing how good of a place we all were in — my mom, my dad, myself. But that’s about it.”
Malice has a characteristically faith-based perspective on those losses: “I know that my parents have not went anywhere that we’re all not going.” The day before, he told me that he felt it was “ordained” that his break from music allowed him to be there to help take care of their mother when she was ailing.
“Birds Don’t Sing,” the first song released from Let God Sort Em Out, is a stirring listen that showcases both men’s maturity, with soaring vocals from John Legend. Push tells me they placed it as the album opener to give listeners expecting so-called coke raps a different introduction to their latest project. Pusha raps to their mom, “I loved you met Nige’, hate that he won’t remember you,” while Malice remembers talking with their father: “I can hear your voice now, I can feel your presence/Askin’ ‘Should I rap again?,’ you gave me your blessing.”
Malice tells me that talk occurred just days before their father’s death. “We were sitting in the car. And I asked him, ‘What do you think about me rapping again?’ He said, ‘Son, I think you’ve been too hard on yourself. You still have to get out here in this world. You still got to take care of your family.’ My dad was a deacon in the church, so he was heavy on Jesus. For him to be able to say that gave me encouragement. I feel like some chains was broken from that conversation.”
After the 2023 Grammys, Pusha flew from L.A. to Miami to work with Williams, and he and Malice began trading verses back and forth. After choosing five beats, they realized they had the makings of a new Clipse album.
As we listen to the album in the studio, Push stands up and begins rapping every word, staring at the wall in front of him as if he’s in front of thousands of fans. Instantly, the music morphs him from a chill, unguarded demeanor to the Joker-esque King Push persona. Even so, he and his brother give each other space to be the informal vibes conductor. Push sits down while Malice is standing and rapping; when Malice sits down, Push gets up and starts rapping again. Both men rap each other’s verses on every song.
Produced entirely by Pharrell, the new album is full of the noxious synths and quaking 808s of the Clipse’s classic work. The features they play me include a sharp Nas verse that Push says he had been seeking for several years. The whole album is laced with a tag of a woman saying, “this is culturally inappropriate”; they tell me it was originally going to be a watermark for advances, but they liked it so much they kept it. (In a podcast appearance on Aug. 28, Pusha noted that they were still waiting on another verse: “Just waiting on a feature, bro. Just one feature.” Back in July, he’d said they were hoping to get a final feature in within the month. It will be a well-marinated appearance if we ever hear it.)
The guys both sound hungry and in sync. And yes — the coke bars are rife. Pusha has a slick line about the Brittney Griner prisoner swap, and a humorous thumbs-down to D-list reality stars that lands in characteristically callous fashion. Malice is mostly reflective, referencing John 10:10 on one verse and rhyming about his winding journey from the streets to the pulpit. Pusha calls it the album of the year, and though there have been many quality projects released in 2024, he has a right to feel that way.
Aside from one undisclosed instance where he didn’t want to “go there” on a song, Malice had no issues with how the project played out thematically. He prayed with his engineer before every recording session in Virginia. (Other sessions took place in Paris with Pharrell.) “There’s so many nuances in this album and in the verses,” he says. He feels called to get his message out to those living the life of excess and temptation he once did. Those wayward souls traversing interstates with their freedom in their trunk are more likely to play some Clipse than a gospel station, and if just one of them hears Let God Sort Em Out and rethinks their lifestyle, then it will have served Malice’s purpose.
“The Bible says Jesus sat with the publicans and the sinners,” he says. “I feel like this space is mine to occupy. I don’t think anyone else could do it. And I feel like now I am able to do it, and I’m not going to forfeit it.”
Both of the brothers say this isn’t the final chapter for the Clipse — it’s the beginning of a new one. “Pharrell says, ‘We gonna keep going!’ ” Pusha says while laughing. “Pharrell calls with that energy every morning, bro. ‘I was listening to the album in the truck last night. I’m going to try some new shit tomorrow.’ I’m like, ‘Come on, bro. Get the mix done with this one.’”
Wherever the duo go next, they know they have each other. Even when their perspective on the music industry seemed diametrically opposed, their brotherly bond kept them rooting for each other. “I know I can count on him. He knows he can count on me, “ Malice says. “Just to have someone like that in your life, someone who is loyal, got your back, even if it’s nobody else … it’s something deeper. I get a lot of security in that.”
Production Credits
Styling by Marcus Paul.
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