Spike F*ck is a rare figure in contemporary music: direct, disarming, and impossible to pin down. Emerging from Melbourne’s underground in the late 2010s with The Smackwave EP, Spike fused bleak synth-pop, post-punk melodrama, and brutally honest songwriting into something both vulnerable and confrontational. Armed with only a backing track and a microphone, early live shows saw Spike sing candidly about addiction, gender, dysfunctional love, and collapse: a kind of wounded sincerity that quickly drew a cult following. Just as things seemed to be breaking open, Spike disappeared, retreating from public life amid a personal reckoning.

After a four-year hiatus -- during which time rumours swirled about death, institutions, or becoming a monk -- Spike returned sober, clear-eyed, and transformed. The music that followed is bigger, wilder, and more alive. Performed with a rotating full band, the new material draws from ‘70s glam, spiritual soul, and damaged rock and roll, but always filtered through Spike’s unmistakable voice: bruised, intense, poetic.

These are songs about recovery, identity, survival, and letting go not sanitised, not triumphant, but real. Where the early work stared into the void, the new work steps forward with purpose. It’s not a reinvention. It’s an evolution, one born from chaos, now grounded in clarity.