Appearing late into 12 Bar Bruise, “Bloody Ripper” is a simple mid-tempo garage rock song described as a “half hate ballad, half love song” by Beat. In a track-by-track rundown of 12 Bar Bruise for Mess+Noise, Stu stated, “Producer Paul Maybury of Rocket Science is a big fan of Wreckless Eric and Stiff Records in general, so there was a lot of that playing in the studio. I think a little bit of that rubbed off on ‘Bloody Ripper’ in a weird way. In the end of the song we slowly sped the song up, with the pitch going with it. It’s kinda like a key change, but more confusing.” The title is Australian slang, meaning awesome or incredible.
The song was released as a single on April 3rd, 2012 with the b-side of “Sam Cherry’s Last Shot.” It was included as part of 12 Bar Bruise on September 7th, 2012 . The title would later be used for one of Gizzard’s earliest tours and was put on a DIY shirt sold by the band.
A music video for “Bloody Ripper” by Zonkvision was released on May 14th, 2012. It shows the band playing the song (occasionally wearing lucha libre masks) with other clips of them overlaid on top. It was filmed and edited by Jason Galea and Greg Holden and was Galea’s first directing gig according to an interview with No Film School. According to an interview for Speaker TV, the video was shot on the same day as the videos for “Muckraker” and “Nein” in Anglesea. In that same interview, Eric mentions that the video was shot using old VHS cameras. According to a Mess+Noise article, this video, as well as “Sam Cherry’s Last Shot,” were edited in a few hours. One of the lucha libre masks seems to appear in the Zonkvision Exhibition Intro. The same day the official video was uploaded to Zonkvision’s channel, the Flightless channel uploaded a live video of the song edited by the Brianstorm Project.
The first confirmed performance of the song was on 2012-05-11 at the Rozelle Hospital for the Insane in Eora (Sydney). Based on available setlist data the song was played throughout 2012 into 2013 with its last known appearance on 2013-04-20 at the Governor Hindmarsh Hotel in Adelaide.