Spikes

Death Grips has always operated at the threshold where sound becomes something physical. Their music does not merely play; it arrives. "Spikes," the third track on their 2016 album Bottomless Pit, is perhaps the most precise distillation of what that arrival feels like: a sustained assault in which every element is deployed with disorienting precision, and the compression of the song's three-minute runtime makes the impact feel somehow larger than its length suggests.

What makes the song unusual within the Death Grips catalog is the combination of genuine hookiness with genuine menace. Critics comparing it to foundational Death Grips classics noted the same combination of ominous texture and focused energy^[5], but "Spikes" achieves something slightly different: it sounds like a song that knows exactly what it wants from you, even as it refuses to tell you what that is.

The Return

When Death Grips announced their breakup in July 2014, the message appeared on Facebook in the middle of the night alongside an image of the recording board showing unfinished masters for what would become The Powers That B. Whether the move was performance, genuine dissolution, or some blurring of both, the band reversed course by early 2015, announced a world tour, and began working toward new material.^[1]

The announcement for Bottomless Pit arrived in October 2015 via a YouTube video featuring Karen Black, the acclaimed character actress who had died in August 2013, reciting lines from an unfinished screenplay written by drummer Zach Hill.^[1] The footage was eerie, posthumous, and clearly deliberate, signaling that the record would carry the weight of absence and perseverance in close proximity. A film that could never be completed, announced by a voice that could no longer speak for itself, framing a record about survival and return.

Recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders, Bottomless Pit was the first Death Grips album to incorporate extended contributions from an outside collaborator: Nick Reinhart, the guitarist of experimental art-rock band Tera Melos.^[1] His guitar work is threaded throughout the album and appears with particular effectiveness on "Spikes," where it functions not merely as texture but as structural counterweight to the synth palette of Andy Morin, known in the band as Flatlander.^[4]

The band also leaked the album themselves through their SoundCloud page a week before its official release date of May 6, 2016, a move widely interpreted as intentional.^[1] By the time "Spikes" reached listeners, it arrived already carrying the fingerprints of a band that had repeatedly shown a preference for controlling the terms of its own disruption.

The Shape of Losing Control

The title itself is a visual metaphor worth sitting with. A spike on a graph is a sudden peak, an anomalous surge that breaks the baseline before collapsing back down. The song appears to be organized around exactly this kind of emotional and behavioral extreme: a narrator who moves through states of recklessness and abandon that suggest someone not quite in command of their own trajectory.^[7]

Critics noted that MC Ride's vocal performance centers on imagery of skidding, of momentum carrying a body past the point of recovery.^[5][6] There is a particular quality to how he delivers these images. The loss of control is not framed as a catastrophe to be prevented but as a condition to be inhabited, perhaps even celebrated. The repetition of the title word in the chorus takes on a chant-like quality, as if the narrator is naming his condition over and over rather than escaping it.

A second interpretive thread runs parallel to this. Moments in the song implicate greed as a force generating its own kind of spikes, pulling the narrator in multiple directions.^[7] In this reading, the title names the shape that desire leaves on the body: sharp, sudden, and ultimately self-wounding. The song does not moralize about this. It inhabits the feeling without offering commentary or distance.

Musically, the production matches these themes with considerable sophistication. The song's verses and transitions shift between different instrumental palettes, with Morin's synths giving way to distorted guitar textures and, in an unusually self-aware gesture, samples of Ride's own voice used as rhythmic material.^[5] The effect is of a song that is cannibalizing itself, feeding its own chaos back into the mix. The structure mirrors its subject: cyclical, compressed, refusing to resolve cleanly.

Treble Magazine observed that Reinhart's guitar contributions made hookier tracks like "Spikes" feel genuinely gratifying in ways that some earlier Death Grips material resisted.^[4] WRMC noted the track as one of the catchiest hooks on the album.^[6] These are not the usual words applied to Death Grips, and their applicability here is part of what makes the song notable. The hooks land, but they land hard and sideways.

Accessible and Uncompromising

Bottomless Pit was widely understood as a creative rebound. After The Powers That B received mixed notices, with some critics calling it Death Grips' least intense effort, the band returned with tighter song structures and a renewed focus on hooks. Pitchfork awarded it 8.1 out of 10, describing a renewed focus on songcraft rather than chicanery.^[2] Rolling Stone called it sounds like no punk on Earth.^[3] The Needle Drop gave it a 9 out of 10. On Metacritic, it earned an 80.^[2]

"Spikes" occupies a particular position in this context. For listeners coming to Death Grips for the first time, the song's comparatively legible chorus structure and clear kinetic energy make it an effective entry point. For longtime fans, it represents confirmation that the comeback was not a soft retrenchment but a sharpening. The concentrated energy the song deploys within three minutes is not diluted aggression; it is aggression made more efficient.

Coog Radio drew direct comparisons between "Spikes" and Death Grips classics from their early career, citing its ability to generate the same combination of ominous texture and propulsive force, and expressing frustration that the song ends when it does rather than continuing.^[5] That frustration is a form of praise. The song leaves listeners wanting more while delivering everything it promises.

What the Spike Might Mean

The title resists a single reading, which is characteristic of how Death Grips operate. Alongside the loss-of-control interpretation and the greed thread, the word "spike" carries connotations of weaponry and defense, of objects designed to wound on contact. The narrator could be describing himself as a source of danger as readily as describing someone in freefall. Both readings produce coherent songs, which is to say the ambiguity is structural rather than accidental.

There is also a technology reading available. The spike as data anomaly sits comfortably within Death Grips' longstanding preoccupation with information overload, digital noise, and the experience of being processed rather than processing.^[8] In this frame, the song is about the experience of being registered as a deviation, of being the outlier a system cannot categorize or account for. Death Grips have always written from the perspective of something the culture cannot contain, and "Spikes" fits cleanly within that tradition.

The song's production reinforces this reading. The way it switches instrumental registers mid-stream, the way Ride's own voice gets sampled back into the beat as raw material, suggests a kind of feedback loop where input and output become indistinguishable. The spike is the signal escaping its own waveform.

Controlled Instability

"Spikes" is three minutes of controlled instability. It does not announce its ambitions, does not pause to explain its images, and does not resolve into anything comfortable. What it does is commit, fully and without apparent hesitation, to the proposition that extreme sensation is a valid form of knowledge.

Death Grips returned from their dissolution period not merely intact but, on this evidence, energized. The contributions of Nick Reinhart brought a structural clarity that previous albums sometimes sacrificed in the pursuit of pure texture,^[4] and the result is a song that feels simultaneously spontaneous and precisely constructed.

In the broader arc of Bottomless Pit, "Spikes" functions as a thesis statement for what the album is attempting: to demonstrate that extremity and accessibility are not opposites, that a song can be genuinely overwhelming and genuinely catchy at the same time, that the spike on the graph can be both the signal and the noise. Death Grips have always believed this. On "Spikes," they prove it.