Bottomless Pit

Bottomless Pit is the sixth studio album by Death Grips, released on May 6, 2016, through Third Worlds and Harvest Records. Recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders, it arrived nearly two years after the band had announced their dissolution in July 2014, a breakup widely understood as performance art rather than a genuine end.^[1]

The album was announced in October 2015 through an eerie video of the late actress Karen Black, who died in August 2013, reciting lines from a screenplay written by drummer Zach Hill. The footage gave the announcement a posthumous, spectral quality that set the tone for the record.^[1] In April 2016, the band released the complete lyrics for all 13 tracks as a downloadable ZIP file before the album dropped, the closest thing to an official commentary on the album's content.^[2]

Critically, the album earned a Metacritic score of 80 out of 100 and was ranked among the best albums of 2016 by multiple publications. Pitchfork scored it 8.1 out of 10, calling it one of their most cohesive records and praising a renewed focus on songcraft. Rolling Stone reviewed it as sounding like no punk on Earth.^[3][4]

Thematically, the record has been read as tracing the arc of war, from its political origins to its devastating conclusion, woven through with Death Grips' characteristic preoccupation with dissociation, technology, and the collapse of identity. It synthesizes the noise-rock abrasiveness of Jenny Death with the textured synthesis of The Money Store, pushing toward tighter song structures and more concentrated hooks while remaining entirely uncompromising in its assault.

The album leaked from the band's own SoundCloud page on April 29, 2016, one week before the official release date, a move widely assumed to be intentional.^[1]