10 Legendary Concept Records Of The 2010's

There's no right way to actually tell your story on a concept album. You're the one who's making the music, and you have to follow your instincts when it comes to telling the kind of story that you want to bring across. Others have tried by going for more bombastic sounds, but Clipping actually managed to capture the cold darkness of space on Splendor and Misery.

Following the narrative of a slave resistance inside of a spaceship, we start things off with the resistance being a success, with our narrator being one of the only ones that survived. Using the motherboard as his last remaining friend, Daveed Diggs spits his rap verses almost like they're pieces of dialogue from a sci fi movie, being as much indebted to Philip K Dick as he is to people like Kendrick Lamar. For as many futuristic parts of this production, there's almost two faces behind these, from the hip hop joint Air Em Out to interpolating different slave chants on songs like Long Way Away or True Believer.

Towards the end of the album, you can hear our narrator getting more and more desperate until eventually putting himself back into cryosleep and setting coordinates for his last chance at life in a galaxy far away from here. This isn't a suicide mission though. Daveed is looking the possibility of death in the face and trying to come out on the other side.