Clipse open Let God Sort Em Out with “The Birds Don’t Sing,” a piano-led hymn to loss that pairs two of rap’s most exact writers with John Legend and Hampton Roads choir Voices of Fire.
Released on 11 July 2025, it is the kind of table-setting opener that tells you the record’s stakes before anything else: grief, guilt, and what you say to the people who raised you when there is no time left.
On paper it sounds like the kind of calculated pivot that reeks of label compromise. Except Pusha T and Malice aren’t pivoting. They’re grieving in public, and they’ve brought Pharrell Williams along to build them a church to do it in.
The song opens with Pusha confessing what amounts to filial failure. His mother’s final days, his absence, the career he chose over her bedside.
“I wasn’t there” cuts through the mix like a blade because he doesn’t dress it up. No metaphor, no wordplay, just the thing he can’t take back.
This is the same man who built a career on immaculate sh*t-talk, and now he’s using that precision to gut himself.
Malice answers with his own reckoning. Finding their father, the moment that changed his trajectory, delivered in that low, steady voice that refuses to perform grief for effect.
Where Pusha’s verse burns hot with regret, Malice goes cold and factual, which somehow makes it worse.
These are men who’ve spent two decades proving how untouchable they are, and here they are admitting they couldn’t stop time or death or their own human limitations.
Legend’s hook and the Voices of Fire harmonies give the verses a place to fall, so the song moves between family confession and gospel lift without losing its centre.
That balance comes straight from the source: Pusha has said the song grew out of a conversation with Pharrell about their parents’ health and the weight of things left unsaid.
Pharrell builds a careful frame for all of this. The beat is patient, the piano keeps time like a metronome in the corner of a hospital room, and the choir cuts in where a lesser producer would stack strings.
The choice reads as respect for the words. You can hear it in the way the chorus opens and then recedes, leaving space for the brothers to keep telling the story.
The video (directed by Brendan O’Connor, released October 1st) takes them back to Virginia, back to the family home, back to the beginning.
It’s almost aggressively literal. No abstraction, no visual metaphor, just two middle-aged men walking through their past while the camera follows.
There’s a Tyrod Taylor cameo that the video could do without, but mostly the clip understands what the song already knows: this story doesn’t need decoration.
“The Birds Don’t Sing” works because Clipse have finally found something they can’t rap their way out of. Death wins. Parents leave.
Time doesn’t negotiate. And all that Virginia corner-boy bravado, all those years of proving they were harder and sharper than everyone else, none of it matters when your mother’s dying and you’re not in the room.
The song is imperfect. That hook might be too easy, too reach-for-the-tissues obvious. But the verses are why God invented recording studios.
They’re the things you say once, to a room, and hope someone remembers. Pusha and Malice have said them to Pharrell’s production and Legend’s harmonies and a choir that knows how to sing what can’t be spoken.
It’s an opener that doesn’t promise fun or bangers or the usual Clipse venom. It promises that Let God Sort Em Out is going to hurt, and it keeps that promise in under four minutes.
Whether you want that from a Clipse album in 2025 is your call. But the honesty is undeniable, and the craft is airtight, and if you’ve ever missed someone who can’t come back, this song will find you where you live.