Yet as his solo career progressed, Pusha says, he began to feel strongly that his brother’s presence was missing not just beside him, but from the rap landscape at large. He’d see comments online about how fans missed his brother’s “super real” perspective about the drug game. “I was like, ‘I got to make sure that I incorporate some of that shit,’ ” he recalls. “And it never quite lands, me trying to be like him. I’m like, ‘Man, I get exactly what y’all miss.’ ”
While they received numerous lucrative offers to reunite over the years, Malice just wasn’t ready. “The money wasn’t comforting to my soul,” he says. He felt like he needed a “firm confirmation” spiritually before jumping back in the booth. “And I would have to have strength in knowing that I could handle what comes with it,” he adds.
In 2019, the brothers collaborated for the first time in nearly a decade, traveling to Wyoming to write for Kanye West’s Jesus Is King album. Malice looks upon their time at the compound fondly, recalling days spent with his brother as well as time in church with Kanye. Push was more frustrated by the songwriting process at Kanye’s writing camp, and says he was almost sent home for his “bad attitude.”
“It’s a lot of different influences out there,” Push says. “You’re trying to write from a perspective of where you think he’s at. You keep it as cool as you think is possible, and think you’re getting the point across proper.” Then, he says, Kanye would “come through, nix it.”
As an example, he says that Kanye took back the song “Follow God” after he and Malice had recorded to it; on the original song, Pusha had planned to reveal that he was about to become a father.
“He gave us the beat,” Pusha says. “Forgot about the beat. We working on the records. We probably laid something to it.”
“We laid it,” Malice confirms.
“Kanye was like, ‘I need that back.’”
Though the “Follow God” fiasco frustrated Push, and Malice agrees that there were “too many chefs in the kitchen,” Malice says it was the first time that the door opened to the possibility of a new Clipse album. In the end, they left Wyoming with “Use This Gospel,” the first Clipse song in years.
