- Partisan
- 2026
The story might be bullshit. As Lip Critic tell it, writing was well underway for the follow-up to 2024 debut Hex Dealer when twisted serendipity struck: Frontman Bret Kaser’s identity was stolen and used to make hundreds of purchases, including — in what Kaser interpreted as a malicious wink — the band’s full discography on Bandcamp. Allegedly, when the offending party showed up at the noisy, hip-hop-infused electronic hardcore band’s merch table a few weeks later in a Five Nights At Freddy’s hoodie, grinning as he recited Kaser’s Social Security number from behind a surgical mask, he revealed himself to be a fan who believed that by hacking Kaser he had defeated a hidden puzzle within Lip Critic’s music. The band says the bizarre saga inspired them to scrap their album progress and start over on a new one about online obsession, fractured identity, and (of course) thievery in modern society.
The narrative sounds suspiciously like a premise these guys might have concocted for one of their propulsive, noise-bombed songs, right alongside the Hex Dealer track about a man convinced his son and the mailman were conspiring to kill him. Or the one about the grifter faking a miracle with meat from the grocery store. Or the one about animal-spliced mutant children that might, if the sharpest minds on Genius can be trusted, be about the manosphere. If this stolen identity business is real, it was too perfect to pass up as fodder for a second helping of Lip Critic madness. And if they made it up, that might fit even better into Theft World’s funhouse-mirror portrait of a modern society run by scammers, from the President of the United States all the way down.
“The whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino,” Donald Trump told reporters just last week, deflecting questions about members of his administration placing lucrative bets related to the war in Iran on prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. Trump is not known for his veracity, but in this instance he’s exactly right. While public health experts keep sounding the alarm, Drake is finding it more lucrative to promote betting alongside sleazy streamers than to go on tour, and the quarterback of a prominent college football program just left his team indefinitely to enroll in a residential treatment program. The house always wins.
But the thievery at the root of our culture goes far beyond gambling. From data breaches to deepfakes, from fake recruiters to Nigerian princes, your smartphone is crawling with people trying to bleed you dry. While Corpus Christi becomes the first US city to run out of water, data centers guzzle endless gallons to power plagiarism machines. American corporations raised prices on consumers to offset the cost of Trump’s tariffs, then collected payouts from the federal government when the Supreme Court ruled those tariffs illegal. Trump himself has spent his presidency running more cons than I can keep track of. Enshittified goods and services, apps designed to monopolize your attention, dwindling cultural output due to corporate consolidation — they’ve all taken something away from us.
This is the reality reflected by Lip Critic’s manic genre splice. With a perpetually escalating intensity, Theft World burrows deeper into the dark absurdity and piercing aggression established on Hex Dealer. This is an album full of naive schmucks, desperate fools, and people chasing the promise of stimulation straight off a cliff, set to a soundtrack like a neverending cyberpunk nervous breakdown. “Jackpot,” in which a wide-eyed Kaser racks up debt in pursuit of a rush, segues directly into “Debt Forest,” which begins with a hollowed-out narrator standing broken before an ATM. On opening track “Two Lucks,” he announces, “In that junk space/ Oh I’m the junk god,” before and after lamenting, “You/ Are the hell/ That I made/ For myself.”
So often, Kaser writes from the perspective of dopamine-addicted characters at the end of their rope. “Always to blame looking for a quick fix/ If it’s one day away I’m already so sick,” he announces on lead single “Legs In A Snare.” “But the way that it goes/ I had to take on the wheel/ I leave myself in the hospital/ Just to know it was real,” he repeats on “Charity Dinner.” The frenetic “Drumming With Izzy” lays plain the addiction at the core of so much compulsive self-destruction: “What I crave is more than life/ What I crave is twice the price/ What I crave’s not in the bank/ It’s buttons pressed and levers cranked.” On the same song, we get a glimpse of the obsessive stan mentality that so often gets tangled up amongst other dark compulsions: “Oh man I would almost/ I die to be near you/ Die to be seen by/ Die to be loved I/ Can’t explain the need why.”
Lip Critic’s music makes these themes hit especially hard. They sound like the internet’s darkest corners barging into physical space — forged in the fires of Death Grips, careening into the space between MSPAINT’s blunt-force synth-punk and YHWH Nailgun’s polyrhythmic noise-rock. There’s a junkyard cyborg quality to the arrangements, melding bits of hardcore, hip-hop, dance-punk, and drum ‘n’ bass with blasts of discordant static and rare, satisfying outbursts of melody. When not growling or bellowing, Kaser often settles into a semi-rapping cadence, yapping like Danny Brown or the Beastie Boys (whose “Sabotage” was an early Lip Critic live fixture). It’s twitchy and explosive stuff, deranged but meticulously crafted, like a shooter’s manifesto.
The aesthetic is intensely distinctive, so it’s wild how much Lip Critic’s sound can morph over the course of one song. “Legs In A Snare” begins with eerie vocal harmonies. Then the beat drops and we’re off to the races, Kaser rapping nimbly and nasally over a booming one-note bass riff and raw, crashing drums. The song builds to a harsh nu-metal throwdown that wouldn’t sound out of place on the Family Values Tour, then bottoms out into a melodic conclusion that nudges the song’s poppy introduction toward something like chiptune. It touches up against so many styles but refuses to settle in anywhere.
That kind of restlessness could be a songwriting liability, but despite the shifting backdrops, Lip Critic never lose the thread. With so much visceral force and kinetic energy, plus a perspective so focused it verges on claustrophobic, the band is able to toggle between modes in a way that brilliantly evokes the attention-deficit-disordered cultural landscape they’re commenting on. “Drumming With Izzy” rides a torrent of tribal drums, and “My Blush (Strength Of The Critic)” follows with big beat bombast worthy of the Chemical Brothers, but they both come across as manifestations of the same id. When the brisk dystopian clatter of “Shoplifting” spills over into a new jack swing bridge topped with haunted-house organ chords, the chaos is intuitive.
What is the emotional takeaway from an album like this one? Exhilaration? Exhaustion? Depression so deep you can only maniacally cackle? Theft World triumphantly succeeds at depicting a society in a dark, demented place. This is not a headspace I’d want to live in all the time, but many people do, or else Lip Critic’s vision wouldn’t be so potent. Though I’d love to believe someday soon this album’s portrait of a chintzy gilded culture rotting from the inside will feel hopelessly outdated, I fear it’s only going to get more prescient. Regardless of whether the album was created under false pretenses, it rings distressingly true.
Lip Critic - Theft World [LP]
Theft World is out 5/1 on Partisan.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Kacey Musgraves' Middle Of Nowhere
• American Football's LP4
• Rostam's American Stories
• Tori Amos' In Times Of Dragons
• Thurston Moore & Bonner Kramer's They Came Like Swallows - Seven Requiems For The Children Of Gaza
• youbet's youbet
• Weird Nightmare's Hoopla
• Hiss Golden Messenger's I'm People
• Isaiah Rashad's It’s Been Awful
• duendita's existential thottie
• Seefeel's Sol.Hz
• Modern Woman's Johnny’s Dreamworld
• Maya Hawke's Maitreya Corso
• Octo Octa's Sigils For Survival
• The Black Keys' Peaches!
• Blarf's Film Scores for Films That Don’t Exist
• Melanie C's Sweat
• Pope's BFM
• Sub*T's How My Own Voice Sounds
• White Beast's Die Hard
• Pigeon's OUTTANATIONAL
• Oddisee & Heno.'s From Takoma With Love
• The Boo Radleys' In Spite Of Everything
• Martin Carr's What Future
• Tyler Bates & RZA's One Spoon Of Chocolate Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
• Jesca Hoop's Long Wave Home
• Eli Moore's The Power Line
• Jump Source's Fold
• Andervel's Ironclad & Palm Trees
• SUICIDAS' Canciones Malditas
• Tarragon's Home At Cofa’s
• Safety Trance's sacrificio
• Eric Gabriel's Lucky Day Roadrunner
• Rita Wilson's Sound Of A Woman
• Laibach's MUSICK
• Genre Is Death's Attractive People
• Gabrielle Cavassa's Diavola
• Anastasia Kristensen's Bestiarium Sombre
• Glissandro 70's G70 2: Bones Of Dundasa
• White Flowers' Dreams For Somebody Else
• Ana Roxanne's Poem 1
• Toadies' The Charmer
• Emily Nenni's Movin’ Shoes
• La Doña's Corrientes
• Ernest's Deep Blue
• Whipped Cream's HOME WAS ALWAYS ME
• Super Furry Animals' Precreation Percolation
• The Claypool Lennon Delirium's The Great Parrot-Ox And The Golden Egg Of Empathy
• Yleiset Syyt's Saitte Mitä Halusitte
• Will White's It’s Easy To Let The Thoughts Gain Ground
• The Klezmatics' We Were Made For These Times
• Gemma's Be About It
• Valley Boy's Children Of Divorce
• Paisley Fields' Are U Mad At Me
• DoYeon Kim's Wellspring
• Cindy's Another Country
• Alberto Giurioli's Leftovers
• Venom's Into Oblivion
• Resilia's By A Thread
• Genre Is Dead's Attractive People
• The High Curbs' High Speed
• Dorian Wood's Canto De Todes
• Miss Bashful's Glamour Snobby
• Psychobuildings' Tears, Vol 1
• Moon Walker's WASTELAND COUNTRY
• Emma Louise's Sunshine For Happiness
• Taj Mahal's Time
• Travess' Blue Sun Lava Lamp
• Noveller's I Am The Weather
• B.o.B.'s The Morning Bang
• Various Artists' Chill’s Spotlight Vol. 7
• above me's above me
• Zara Larsson's Midnight Sun: Girls Trip
• Halsey's The Great Impersonator: Deluxe
• Daniel Avery's Tremor (Deluxe)
• Rodrigo y Gabriela's Rodrigo y Gabriela (20th Anniversary Deluxe)
• The Head And The Heart's The Head And The Heart (15th Anniversary Deluxe)
• Godsmack's Live At Mohegan Sun
• Eagles' One Of These Nights (Deluxe Edition)
• Public Circuit's R//MIX//S
• HEALTH's ADDENDUM EP
• No Peeling's EP2
• Jenny On Holiday's Quicksand Heart - Excess Baggage EP
• Church Chords' Apophatic Melismatic (The Schlager Remix EP +3)
• ONE OK ROCK's Live From DETOX JAPAN TOUR 2025 EP
• Casper Sage's Patina EP
• Luca Longobardi's Tempo Fugit EP
• ugly ozo's Dive EP
• Pictoria Vark's Live At TNK EP
• VCTMS' Pain Processing II EP
• Smarm's Smarm EP
• Laura Cahen's Side By Side EP
• Austin Snell's Colors EP
• Morning Silk's Have A Nice Life EP
• Tomorrow Woman's Plays Machines EP
• MLEKO's Feast Of St Perpetua EP
• face of ancient gallery's Like Kites EP
• Paris WYA's MANNEQUIN EP
• People I've Met's Bunny EP
• Easy Honey's Plaid EP
• TWS' NO TRAGEDY Mini Album
