Clipping expand Splendor and Misery this week, releasing the Anniversary X edition on Friday, November 13, 2026, a tenth anniversary double LP that adds eight previously unreleased songs and alternate takes to the original album. The date honesty first: the album itself was released on September 9, 2016, on Sub Pop and Deathbomb Arc. This is a catalogue deep dive around a deluxe reissue, not a new album.
Splendor and Misery is the Los Angeles trio’s sci-fi opus, a Hugo Award nominated concept album built by rapper Daveed Diggs with producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson. Sub Pop’s release notes for the Anniversary X edition confirm the shape of the package: the original fifteen song tracklist, the eight extra recordings, and revised artwork, pressed as a 2xLP with a Metallic Silver vinyl variant for North American preorders through the label’s Mega Mart while supplies last.
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Splendor and Misery Anniversary X, eight songs deeper
The original album’s premise still reads like nothing else in rap. In Sub Pop’s own description of the record:
Splendor and Misery is an Afrofuturist, dystopian concept album that follows the sole survivor of a slave uprising on an interstellar cargo ship, and the onboard computer that falls in love with him.
That story, told largely from inside a cargo hold, made the album a landmark of narrative hip hop and earned its Hugo Award nomination, a science fiction honour almost no rap album has approached. Diggs, who had just stepped away from his dual roles in the original Broadway run of Hamilton, rapped the survivor’s logs in dense, rapid patterns while Snipes and Hutson built the ship around him out of noise, static and silence.
Why the extra eight songs matter
Anniversary editions earn their keep when the added material changes how the original reads, and a concept album is the best case for it. Eight unreleased songs and alternate takes from the Splendor and Misery sessions are eight more pieces of a closed fictional world: alternate versions show which choices the trio rejected, and unreleased tracks extend a story that was designed to feel complete. For a record this tightly constructed, the outtakes are documents, not filler.
The group has been marking the anniversary all year. In August, clipping. curated Splendor and Misery Fest at the Knockdown Center in Flushing, New York, with a lineup that included SPELLLING, Shabazz Palaces, ELUCID and Fatboi Sharif, a bill that mapped the album’s own neighbourhood of experimental rap. The Anniversary X vinyl closes that celebration by putting the expanded edition on shelves.
A catalogue that keeps growing sideways
Ten years on, Splendor and Misery holds a particular place in the clipping. catalogue: the moment an underground noise rap act proved it could sustain a full narrative across an album and take that album to a Hugo nomination. The Anniversary X edition, out November 13 on Sub Pop, is the label’s own verdict on the record’s standing. Deluxe double vinyl, revised art and eight songs pulled from the vault are how a catalogue title gets treated when it has become a classic.
