Spike Hellis made a single that insists it has no bite

"No Bite" arrives chrome-plated and looking for a fight it says it doesn't want. The track rides what Post-Punk.com's Alice Teeple calls a "soft jackhammer groove" — a kick pattern that drops, pulls back, drops again — and the empty space between hits is doing half the work. 1 Teeple's description of the song as "body music with its teeth filed to points" captures something real: this is music that has an opinion about your posture. 1 It runs 4 minutes 27 seconds and earns most of them. 2

Spike Hellis is a Los Angeles duo: Cortland Gibson and Lainey Chang, who formed the project on Halloween 2019 — the date is not accidental. 4 They put out their debut EP Crisis Talk in 2020, followed by their self-titled debut album in April 2022 on their own Over-Pop imprint. 4 That first record — bookmarked by the bass-first opener "Control (Rage)" and the hook-heavy closer "Mouth" — ran up a touring circuit that included a 40-date headlining run and festival billings at Cold Waves, Substance, and Verboden. 5 They shared stages with ADULT., Kontravoid, Twin Tribes, and Portrayal of Guilt — a mix of industrial and post-punk lineages that tells you exactly where the band sits on the map. 5 Reviewer Nathaniel Fitzgerald at TUNED UP called the debut "honestly pop music at its core, full of earworms and grooves that make even the gloomiest goths want to dance." 6

If you haven't spent time in EBM (Electronic Body Music) before: it's a genre that formed in Europe in the early 1980s when industrial noise acts — Throbbing Gristle, early Einstürzende Neubauten — discovered that repetitive rhythm could be as confrontational as pure distortion. The result was music made for clubs but built from factory-floor logic: minimal drum machines, locked grooves, vocals that bark more than sing. Bands like Front 242, Nitzer Ebb, and DAF set the blueprint. Spike Hellis are working from that same stripped-down template, except Chang's vocals range from cold, controlled melody into something closer to incantation, and Gibson's production strips the arrangements down until every element that stays sounds like it had to fight to be there.

"No Bite" is the second preview single from the duo's upcoming second album Successor, set for release on August 7 through Over-Pop. 2 The first single, "By God," landed in April and drew a comparison from FILTER México — a publication with 215,000 Twitter followers — to the industrial sound of Chicago's Wax Trax! Records. 7 "No Bite" dropped on Bandcamp on May 22 and received its editorial premiere on Post-Punk.com today, May 26. 1 The band has a 40-plus city North American tour beginning July 31 in Santa Ana, CA and running through October 9 in Seattle. 2 This is a band that tours hard; the single is as much advance warning as it is music.

The Swamp Booking bio tags their entire project as "body music to hijack the amygdala." 5 That phrase — and this single — land differently once you've heard them. "No Bite" insists it has no teeth, then the beat drops back in and you realize the joke was on you.

Listen: No Bite on Bandcamp — digital, $1.50 USD, 24-bit/48kHz download included. Also streaming on Apple Music and Spotify. 2