This new track sees Kanye at his very best, corralling his anger with masterful focus into an apocalyptic vision of America

America, divided along racial and political lines and led by its own Herod, faces an invisible plague and a public reckoning against its history of violence. It’s against this Biblical backdrop that Kanye West imagines the next apocalyptic event, in one of his most focused and arresting tracks for years.

Wash Us in the Blood sees the rapper call for a blood rain to deliver black America from evil. We’re at the point, perhaps, where normal water won’t wash; an emergency where we need something stronger. That sense of alarm is amplified by the two-note siren motif, a flattened-out version of the feedback sound on The Life of Pablo’s Feedback or Yeezus’s Send It Up, another of his warnings that puts the listener on alert. It gets your blood up.