Klokwerk E are “juggalo rappers” in the most genuine sense of the word. They are juggalos, they are rappers and they’ve taken the lessons and influences of Insane Clown Posse and the larger juggalo culture and used them to create something new and uniquely Klokwerk E.
Until now, horrorcore was the one core element of the juggalo rap scene that Klokwerk had rarely dabbled in. They’ve made a few stray horrorcore songs, like the excellent “Dahma Ya Mama” with S.O.N, and their last album, The Emerald Tablets, included some darker elements, but if you had described Klokwerk E in 2024 and prior as a “horrorcore group”, I would have said you were listening wrong.
That all changes with their new album, Anubis, named after the ancient Egyptian god of funerary practices and care of the dead who is usually depicted as a dog or as a man with the head of a dog. Anubis is a horrorcore record. Or is it a wicked shit record? Is there even a difference? I typically don’t think so. It often feels like splitting hairs when the distinction is brought up. That said, when I think back on early ICP and Esham music, the key thing that separates them from your average horrorcore act is the use of dark themes as tools to explore the true horrors that exist in every day society, especially among impoverished and marginalized people. Albums like Esham’s KKKill the Fetus and ICP’s Ringmaster are as much about things like poverty, racism and a lack of support from the government as they are about the devil or killer clowns. This is where I think it would be fair to say that Anubis falls more neatly into the “wicked shit” category.
A song like “Put a Spell On You” feels very much in the lineage of the Esham and ICP of yesteryear. Here, Kyle Kombs(one half of Klokwerk, along with Billy D) alludes to witchcraft and casting spells, but also touches on the “spells” that society casts on us and holds us under. Lines like “They wrote a spell and spelled it well, they call it national news” and “It's in the breakfast, the Netflix, the phones, you glued to the message/It's in the pointless election, arguments over complexion/It's the miseducation, it's in the pills you be takin’/But the facts and the secrets, they call it misinformation/Just take your dose, just go to work, just get the job done/They sell you hope, they built a church to make you all dumb” speak to the idea of society itself being a spell cast on all of us to keep us complacent and quiet worker bees, unconcerned with rising out of our situation, so long as we’re distracted by the latest outrage cycle and celebrity gossip. This is elevated horrorcore and if that’s what defines “wicked shit”, then consider this wicked shit.
That said, this is still a Klokwerk E album. Songs like “Dirty Dirt Bag” and “You Got A Nice Ass” bring the gross out sex and comedy that long time Klokwerk E fans have come to expect, while being darker and harder musically, fitting nicely into the rest of the album.
These two modes blend perfectly on “Catfish”, a clear album standout. Kyle and Billy spend the first two verses of “Catfish” pining for a woman they’ve each met online. Over text she seems like the perfect fantasy, but she refuses to send videos or FaceTime the boys. Could she be deceiving them? As it turns out, yes. The girl of Klokwerk’s dreams turns out to be The King of Dark Energy himself, S.O.N, as a character named Mr. Pancake who lures the boys into a trap right out of Silence of the Lambs. The balance of comedy and horror in “Catfish” is straight out of a 90s ICP album and suits Klokwerk perfectly. There are plenty of sad sack sex jokes but also just the right pinch of darkness to give the song something special. It’s the type of story telling and horror comedy I don’t think I’ve heard executed this well since 90s ICP. The fact that Mr. Pancake fan art already exists is proof that the song is an underground hit.
“Temu Sex Toy” is another remarkably Klokwerk E horror story. In the song, Kyle orders a sex toy on the Chinese discount site, only for it to leave him, um…dis-membered, so to speak. The story is funny, legitimately squirm-worthy and the beat fucking knocks. Songs like “Catfish” and “Temu Sex Toy” are the most obvious route for Klokwerk E going horrorcore. They play into the grossout humor they’ve laid out as core to their brand over a long run of standalone singles, but the angles they explore are darker and more violent. It shows that in order to make wicked shit, Klokwerk didn’t need to sacrifice any of their strengths, they just had to add different shading and texture to them.
The last stretch of Anubis is the darkest Klokwerk have ever gone on record. Kyle’s beats, which are incredible throughout the album, get more sparse and eerie. Songs like “Ten Plagues” and “Help Me Hide A Body” are built around staccato piano stabs and heavy bass. “Night of the Living Meth Heads”, an update on ICP’s “Basehead Attack” produced by ILLtemper, is a spooky zombie story about addicts crawling out of their holes at night to terrorize Kyle and Billy’s neighborhood. The story telling and production are so effective, it may best the Hell’s Pit track it pulls from.
For my money, the best track on Anubis is “Everything’s Dead”. A spooky, sample based hook surrounds verses in which Billy and Kyle tell two different stories about death. Billy goes first, describing waking up to his mother dead from an OD on the couch. Instead of alerting authorities, Billy washes and skins the woman so that he can impersonate her and act like nothing happened, attending parent teacher conferences and introducing dates to “Mama”. This verse is my favorite thing on this entire album. In 16 bars, it tells a genuinely chilling horror story. Kyle follows this with a description of waking up dead and buried and digging himself up for one more night of sexy debauchery. The way Billy and Kyle tell two completely different stories around the same theme allows both ideas just enough space to leave you wanting more. It’s incredibly effective and one of my favorite Klokwerk songs to date.
Anubis’ final song, “Take What’s Mine”, has already proven to be its most divisive. “Take What’s Mine” is an incredibly dark story about abducting, abusing, sexually assaulting and ultimately murdering women. The tone setting and story telling is effective enough to make this song genuinely uncomfortable. One thing that I find interesting about the conversation surrounding “Take What’s Mine” is that I don’t think it would even be a conversation if they did not use the word “rape” multiple times in the lyrics, including in the chorus. I think if this word was omitted from the song, there would be very little conversation about it at all, as this genre has seen hundreds of songs about abducting and murdering women. Typically they don’t even warrant a bat of the eye at this point. By “going there”, Klokwerk have created something that shakes me(I can’t speak for anyone but me on this matter) out of the desensitized state that years of horrorcore has put me in and makes the whole thing feel real and, in that, feel real bad. And again, maybe this is the difference between “wicked shit” and “horrorcore”. There’s a gravity to this song that reminds me of early Esham tracks like “Momma Was a Junkie” or “Living In Incest”. These are also bleakly dark songs about things that actually happen in the world, often in poor communities. These are the communities that birth an Esham or a Klokwerk E. Are these songs tasteless? Yeah, I think so. Are they also effective art, arguably because they’re tasteless? I think a case could be made for sure.
Anubis was a big swing for Klokwerk E. It wasn’t the safest path for them to go down at all. Their most well known song continues to be “Juggalo Penis” by a very large margin. They could have easily dropped ten of those to uproarious fanfare. In taking a gamble and making something dark, nuanced and somewhat left field, I think Klokwerk made the album that is going to solidify them as one of the most important and talented acts in the underground/juggalo scene today. Go pull up the lyrics on Genius and really sit with this record. Consider it. Let it take you on a journey. It’s worth it.