{"id":558506,"date":"2026-04-30T10:06:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T10:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/558506\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T10:06:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T10:06:09","slug":"a-flurry-of-chaos-paranoia-and-corrosive-desire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/558506\/","title":{"rendered":"a flurry of chaos, paranoia and corrosive desire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou are the hell that I made for myself,\u201d repeats Lip Critic<\/a> frontman Bret Kaser on \u2018Two Lucks\u2019, the opening track to the band\u2019s second album \u2018Theft World\u2019. An anxious, self-lacerating spiral, the song throws you straight into the album\u2019s central tensions of obsession, possession and destruction. As synths buckle and percussion hits like machinery tearing itself apart, Kaser frames desire as something terrifyingly corrosive.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard not to draw a line from that mindset to the real-life fan who stole Kaser\u2019s identity and made hundreds of purchases in his name. When the band eventually tracked him down, he was wearing a Five Nights At Freddy\u2019s<\/a> hoodie and claimed he believed Lip Critic had been hiding coded messages in their music as part of an elaborate scavenger hunt. They recorded him as he explained this imagined mythology, filled with characters, symbols and conspiracies. In response, they scrapped the material they had been working on before and created \u2018Theft World\u2019.<\/p>\n

That tension runs through every track on the album. Since breaking out of New York\u2019s underground in 2024 with \u2018Hex Dealer\u2019<\/a>, the band have built a reputation for excess, their sound borrowing the abrasiveness of hardcore and throwing it together with electronic textures and post-punk vocals that echo Black Midi at their greatest. And on \u2018Theft World\u2019, that signature chaos feels newly focused, the noise mirroring the mental instability and anguish at the album\u2019s core.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Back in 2024, Kaser told NME<\/a> that their music is \u201cthe sound of us trying to make the most visceral, poppy, sweet candy moments and the darkest, disgusting, viscerally gross moments too\u201d. Here, it\u2019s captured on \u2018Jackpot\u2019, where a Death Grips-style beat stutters like a casino floor short-circuiting, while the climax reaches Cronenberg levels of gore: \u201cPull the zippers out \/ Hidden underneath my skin \/ Coin pouch and her allowance\u201d. It\u2019s gross and thrilling and weirdly catchy all at once.<\/p>\n

Tensions peak at \u2018Legs in a Snare\u2019, one of the album\u2019s most emotionally exposed moments. Beneath the blown-out production and spiralling repetition, there\u2019s something almost painfully direct in lines like, \u201cSo I\u2019m taking down the pictures \/ And I\u2019m packing up the clothes,\u201d where collapse feels domestic and immediate rather than abstract. Meanwhile, the refrain of \u2018200 Bottles On Eviction\u2019 lands cold and indifferent, like a final verdict. By the time Kaser repeats \u201cI lost myself\u201d, the record reaches an acceptance of total vulnerability.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s brutally clear that even after your money, privacy and sense of self are taken, life in \u2018Theft World\u2019 keeps going, indifferent to whatever you\u2019re feeling. Yet it\u2019s that sense of twisting bleakness into something that sounds thrilling is what makes the album so effective. Lip Critic take the horror of Kaser\u2019s very personal trauma into something strangely communal and alive. Rather than just documenting, they place you right in the centre of the chaos \u2013 and you\u2019ve got to sit with it, no matter how weird things get.<\/p>\n

Details<\/p>\n

\"lip<\/p>\n

Record label: Partisan Records
\nRelease date: May 1, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cYou are the hell that I made for myself,\u201d repeats Lip Critic frontman Bret Kaser on \u2018Two Lucks\u2019,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558507,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,3584,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-558506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-rock","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558506\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}