Hell Hath No Fury is released

Why it matters

Hell Hath No Fury came out November 28, 2006, on Re-Up Gang/Jive. Clipse was the duo of Pusha T and Malice, Virginia Beach brothers who had been working with the Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo) since the late 1990s. The Neptunes produced almost everything on the album. The album had been finished for four years by the time it came out; Jive had been sitting on it through a contract dispute that finally resolved in 2006. The four-year delay is part of the legend of the album. Clipse had been releasing some of the most highly anticipated rap material of the early 2000s on the We Got It 4 Cheap mixtape series, which built the hype for the album to a kind of fevered pitch that no commercial release was going to be able to satisfy. Hell Hath No Fury, when it came out, satisfied it anyway. The Neptunes production on the album is the harshest, sparest, most-minimal-and-most-dread-laden version of their late-90s and early-2000s sound. Pusha and Malice's writing is dense with cocaine-trade detail rendered as careful technical metaphor. "Mr. Me Too," "Wamp Wamp," "Keys Open Doors," "Nightmares." You should hear it. It is one of the few rap albums of the 2000s that lived up to the wait.