Six months on, Let God Sort ’Em Out feels less like an album than a settled fact. Not a comeback, not a victory lap, not a nostalgia exercise, but something colder and stranger: an inevitability realised.

Across thirteen tracks and 40 minutes, Pusha T and Malice tango and backflip across a set of flawless Pharrell Williams beats with an energy, majesty, and delight that surpasses mere infectiousness. Their flows are so distinct in texture and timbre, yet so inseparably the same, that the mind reaches for biological metaphors: they are Siamese twins of rhythm and intent. If the essence of shared genetics could rap, this is how it would sound.

The reunion of Clipse (forty-plus-year-old siblings Pusha T and Malice) following a near-twenty-year hiatus does not invoke reconciliation. Time, divergence, faith, and loss had failed to corrode the essential thing, and here they step back out freakishly intact.

This is not simply great coke rap. It is among the most singular, coherent, and intentional rap albums in years, thumping with a clarity of tone, vision, and internal logic that rap has rarely achieved in the last decade. Yet unlike the singular voice of JID’s The Forever Story, this clarity is born not of one mind, but three fused together. A hive-consciousness operating at frightening precision.

What makes the album so enthralling is not novelty of subject matter, but mastery of motion. Pusha and Malice do not ride the beats, for riding implies separation. Surfing, skating, flitting, vaulting, undulating: even these feel insufficient. More apt is the image of a dolphin swimming within a wave’s crest, not atop it, entirely embodied by its force and direction. Their flows are not placed on the beat; they are shaped by it, shaped with it. Beat as wave, verse as body.

Pharrell’s role here is astonishing. He does not compete for attention, nor does he decorate. He stitches himself into this sonic fraternity so seamlessly that no scar remains to indicate his later insertion. This is Pharrell Williams as architect and scaffolder, not auteur or designer; the rare builder who understands that the highest craft lies in knowing precisely where to disappear.

If Let God Sort ’Em Out is the Sagrada Familia of coke rap, then the brothers’ Siamese hive-mind is that of Gaudí, and Pharrell the master builder: obsessive about structure, reverent toward form, and patient enough to work on something that does not belong to the moment of its making. It is an approach that mirrors his tenure as creative director of Louis Vuitton, a house defined by permanence and recognisability, yet newly saturated with colour, play, and cultural elasticity. Timelessness, here, is not stasis; it is endurance made vivid.

His production oscillates between brooding threat (P.O.V., EBITDA, Chains & Whips, Let God Sort ’Em Out) and sweeping, almost obscene glory (So Far Ahead, M.T.B.T.T.F., F.I.C.O., Inglorious Bastards). Yet even within this binary he finds extraordinary variety. Fuzzy, heady, faux-grandiose, ever-gritty, and always timeless.

P.O.V. loops and meanders with wince-inducing spookiness, whining and cruising with persistent angst, briefly breathing open before clasping itself shut again. Chains & Whips revisits the isolated thump last heard on the Pharrell-produced No Church in the Wild, underscored by a kaleidoscopic soundscape of scratching, bombast, and cruelty. EBITDA spirals upwards on a promise of resolve that never grants, like Melman’s fruitless ascent of Madagascar 2’s sacrificial volcano. So Be It slithers with Middle-Eastern inflection, violins playing snake charmer as Pusha beckons the listener toward forbidden tea.

But, to my ear, the crown jewel – the Koh-i-Noor at its glistening centre – is So Far Ahead. Pharrell’s over-pitched vocals bloom into a gospel choir before collapsing into a brain-massaging hum married to a bassline with more body than André the Giant. It is sublime, endlessly replayable, and structurally mischievous. Flex as benediction; exultation as exhaust.

Pharrell deserves flowers for this album – pearly orchids, electric delphiniums, peach-heavy magnolias – but he is not the star.

The stars are the brothers, and the miracle is how they move.

Their verses feel inevitable. Not improvised, not strained, not performative. Each syllable arrives married to rhythm and metre with terrifying intuition. On Ace Trumpets, the “grungey whizz” tempering the beat becomes Russian ballerinas pirouetting inside a snow globe as powder drifts downward. On So Far Ahead, sibilance slides across semi-breves while plosives punch pulses; each line a pump track, shoulders driving handlebars, momentum sustained through sheer technique.

They don’t merely follow the imagery of the beat; they live inside it. Elegance and misogyny, opulence and danger, maximal living rendered without apology. “Shopping sprees in Soho, you had to see it / Strippers shaking ass and watching the door blow.”

Brutal, obscene, and delivered without moral scaffolding.

At times, they don’t even wait for the beat. On M.T.B.T.T.F., Pusha opens unaccompanied, conjuring melody and atmosphere alone, like a jump-rope flicked idly while Pharrell bides his time. The beat hops in; later it drops away again, and Malice steps forward, never outshone.

Their rhyme schemes are audacious yet frictionless; entire verses run on a single phonetic engine. On So Far Ahead, Pusha’s opening run (“Britney Griner… Obama… Chapo… Picasso… Roscoe’s… Gestapo…”) is so brazen it becomes comedic, yet never slips into self-congratulation. There is no filler, no mid-set slump. Every syllable is A-game.

Even the hooks carry weight. Hypnotic, thematic, doubling down on meaning while opening wormholes into lived experience. On F.I.C.O., Stove God Cooks’ line, “With a fetty so strong you gotta bag it with one eye closed”, lands not as description but sensation: a sour-sweet jolt on the tongue, lemon juice in a fresh wound. The bass follows it in, his voice thick with venom, pushing against the beat like Conway the Machine with extra splash.

The features arrive not as interruptions but as homage. Kendrick, Tyler, Nas: names that read like a slightly misguided Mount Rushmore of rap, all showing up to pay tribute. Kendrick’s “Gen/Gin” scheme is both breathtaking and ridiculous; Tyler delivers one of his heaviest verses in years; and Nas sounds like time made audible – unbothered, inevitable, above the scramble. And yet, Push and Malice still dominate: whisper-sinister, razor-sharp, impossibly composed.

Yes, every other bar concerns cocaine. And yet the theme never exhausts itself. The language is too alive. The metaphors too sharp. “The Bezos of the nasal”; “Drugs killed my teen spirit, welcome to Nirvana”; “Catch me in the kitchen where the dope is, apron whiter than the Pope’s is.” This is not obsession; it is mastery of a closed symbolic system.

But to hear this album purely as bravado is to miss its moral zero-point. Let God Sort ’Em Out opens with grief. The Birds Don’t Sing confronts the recent deaths of both parents, immediately reframing everything that follows. “Lost in emotion, mama’s youngest… tryna navigate life without a compass.” This loss is not a theme introduced and abandoned; it is the ground state. After this, judgement feels beside the point.

The birds do not sing; they screech in pain. And although the album’s subjects deviate, echoes persist: “Open the sunroof, wave to my father.” Loss hums quietly beneath the opulence.

This tonal shift is often misread as unresolved. It isn’t. Reflection does arrive, just without catharsis. On P.O.V., Malice admits to returning for money, then hiding it from the church – Jekyll and Hyde without apology. On By the Grace of God, gratitude surfaces alongside contradiction. “Was I cooking death when I was baking?” Reflection, yes, but absolution? Not searched for, not expected, and never found.

What emerges then is acceptance, not hypocrisy. The title is not a plea. It is a recognition. Judgement, if it exists, lies elsewhere.

And this is where the album’s true miracle reveals itself: these contradictions are not borne by one man trying to reconcile them, but by two men sustaining them together.

Brotherhood here is not sentiment or theme; it is infrastructure – shared interiority given form. Two people running the same software, speaking a language no outsider could learn in a thousand years. Same frequency. Same pitch. Entirely different expressions.

That paradox – sameness without redundancy, difference without fracture – is what makes this album so compelling. I’ve felt it elsewhere: watching twins, encountering doubles, sensing unspoken alignment. In the words of James Franco’s Dave Skylark, “Same same, but different”.

What ultimately distinguishes Let God Sort ’Em Out is not that Pusha T and Malice have lived extraordinary lives but that they have lived them together. Not side by side – entangled. Their divergences do not read as departures so much as alternate expressions of the same originating force. One leaves, one stays. One finds God, one doubles down. And yet when they reunite, nothing needs translating.

This is why the album’s contradictions do not tear it apart. They are not reconciled – they are contained.

Held in tension by a bond that predates choice, belief, and identity itself.

When examined too closely, brotherhood emerges as something rather alien. Not friendship, not alliance, not even love, but shared origin. Two consciousnesses emerging from the same genetic sentence, spoken once and echoed twice. Different inflections, same grammar.

A brother is shared origin walking around outside you. Same root system, different branches. Near-identical beginnings, then life gets to work: chance, choice, temperament, the quiet violence of small divergences accruing into two whole people. To encounter a brother is not to compare, but to hear the same world answered back from a different mouth.

That is the quiet miracle animating Let God Sort ’Em Out. Pusha T and Malice do not merely rap well together; they recognise each other. Their voices lock not because of rehearsal, but because recognition precedes effort. They speak a language forged before language: a private syntax of shared memory, inherited instinct, and unspoken reference. It is not learned. It is remembered.

This is why their unity feels so freakish, so intact. Not because they avoided fracture, but because fracture was already absorbed.

Faith, crime, grief, time: all processed within the same closed system. When Malice raps of God, and Pusha of product, these are not opposing claims; they are different answers to the same originating question. The album does not adjudicate between them because adjudication would misunderstand the bond.

Brotherhood does not resolve contradiction. It outlives it.

There is, too, something fatalistic here. The sense that, after sufficient reflection, all roads curve back toward origin. That moral accounting, once exhaustively performed, gives way to acceptance; not absolution, not forgiveness, but recognition. It couldn’t have been any other way.

This is not resignation. It is clarity without comfort.

The album’s title is often misread as deferral, a shrug toward divine judgement. In truth, it feels more like a boundary. A line drawn beyond which human moral arithmetic no longer functions. We’ll let God sort it out. Not because we refuse to think, but because thinking has already run its course.

What remains, then, is presence. Two men standing in the now, delivered here by parents, by grace, by survival, and by each other. The past neither redeemed nor denied, but folded, compressed into sound, rhythm, and voice.

In this sense, Let God Sort ’Em Out is not a comeback, nor even a statement. It is a demonstration: of what happens when shared origin proves stronger than divergence; when difference sharpens, rather than dissolves, sameness.

It is a triumph not because it explains anything, but because it proves that some bonds require no explanation at all.

Pusha and Malice did not arrive here despite everything they lived. They arrived here because of it. Their former lives of crime, their diverging paths, the loss of their parents, all absorbed into a single, immovable present.

This album is their story, realised in poetry and sound

It is a triumph.

And it is a testament to the fierce, uncanny, and indescribable miracle that brotherhood is.