The album continues the
slasher film themes and abrasive production style of Clipping's previous album,
There Existed an Addiction to Blood, essentially serving as its second half. According to the band, the album "contains sixteen more scary stories disguised as rap songs, incorporating as much influence from
Ernest Dickerson,
Clive Barker, and
Shirley Jackson as it does from
Three 6 Mafia,
Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and
Brotha Lynch Hung". As with other Clipping albums,
Daveed Diggs' lyrics avoid first-person narration, primarily describing the events in third person or addressing the listener in second person. The production on the album is heavy, often bordering on distortion, with influences from both modern
industrial,
noise,
power electronics and 1980s horror movie soundtracks. Describing his disappointment with many
concept albums that he encountered being still primarily "guitar-drums-bass", producer
Jonathan Snipes stressed that the band aimed to choose timbres and sounds that were meaningful in the context of the songs and referenced concepts described in the lyrics. The band are known for their meticulous approach to sampling and avoidance of using pre-made
royalty-free sounds, recording all of the samples and sound effects themselves. On the closer, "Secret Piece", and throughout the album, Clipping also use a number of
dawn chorus recordings that Snipes and
field recordist Christopher Fleeger made at famous murder sites, The title of the album quotes a line by
Scarface from "
Mind Playing Tricks on Me" by
Geto Boys, sampled in re-recorded form on the album's first single, "Say the Name", which also references the 1992 slasher film
Candyman. For the chorus of "Say the Name", which repeats the quote, the band recorded Diggs's voice and pitched it down, since the vocal track of "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" was never available separately. The song was already "old to them", according to the band, by the time they were sequencing their previous album,
There Existed an Addiction to Blood, and was meant to be its second single, however, obtaining permission for the sample proved difficult. Since "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" itself contains a sample of "Hung Up on My Baby" by
Isaac Hayes, permission had to be obtained from his estate also, even though no part of Hayes's work is in "Say the Name"; yet, as a result, the Isaac Hayes estate owns a larger percent of "Say the Name" than Clipping members or Scarface. According to the band, the extended instrumental coda of the song was inspired by the
Nine Inch Nails song "
Closer", since early on during the production of the song, the drum sounds reminded them of it. "96 Neve Campbell", the album's second single, is centered around a re-imagining of the
slasher "
final girl" archetype, such as
Sidney Prescott portrayed by
Neve Campbell in the
Scream series, with
the first Scream film coming out in 1996, hence the name. In the song, the female leads themselves are portrayed as grotesquely violent and threatening, as performed by rap duo Cam & China, with Diggs both narrating the track and performing the part of the killer, his voice altered to sound as if it were heard over the phone. In an interview with
Anthony Fantano, the band revealed that before Diggs wrote the final verse of the song, Hutson had pitched a list of several other possible titles for the song, such as "78
Jamie Lee Curtis" and "84
Heather Langenkamp". The third single, "Pain Everyday", recorded in
time and containing
breakbeat influences, describes the experiences of
afterlife as painful and features recordings by paranormal investigator and
electronic voice phenomenon researcher Michael Esposito. It was the last song recorded for the album, upon insistence from Snipes that the album, like other Clipping releases, contain at least one song that is not in time. The unusual time signature, which, according to Hutson, sounded as if the beat was "tripping over itself", coupled with the EVP recordings by Esposito, inspired the band to write a "chase sequence" piece involving ghosts. As with most other Clipping releases, the album closes with a recording of an avant-garde performance piece, in this case,
Yoko Ono's 1953 "event score", "Secret Piece", which was published in her 1964 book
Grapefruit. The piece consists of text instructions for the performer: The band, particularly Hutson, were struck by the peculiarity of the wording, since it did not require for the performer to actually be in the woods, only to use an
accompaniment. The band then turned to field-recordist Christopher Fleeger, who provided them with gigabytes of his own field recordings that were made in forests around the world, between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m., matching the criteria in the piece. ==Critical reception==