The guitarist and keyboardist Adrian Utley recalled that "The Rip" first started out as a minimal guitar-and-voice folk song, but the band had "so many ideas [and] things that evolved [...] and then [were] discarded" that led up to the final version.

It later transitions through an artificially sustained note by the vocalist Beth Gibbons' voice into being electronic with what Sal Cinquemani of Slant describes as a "cyclic synth-bass loop".

[7][6][1] Reviewers offered imaginative descriptions of the latter section, with one stating it exists in "the enchanted realm of early Kraftwerk," and another saying it feels like being in "little fluffy clouds" over a "sci-fi landscape".

[10] Garrett Kamps of The Village Voice called the song "so good it may have been worth waiting 10 years for", with Jim Windolf of Vanity Fair thinking of it upon first listen as a "new classic" comparable to "Stairway to Heaven" or "You Are My Sunshine".

[citation needed] The English musician Thom Yorke played the song live as a part of Radiohead later that same year and with Portishead in 2015 at Latitude Festival.