LustSickPuppy—who makes a madcap meld of punk, digital hardcore, rave, and rap—typically exerts a hyper-confident lusty indignation. It’s not that Tommy Hayes, the mind behind LustSickPuppy (LSP to the heads), doesn’t ever mention romance or melancholy within the turbulence of their mostly self-produced discography, which now totals 27 songs and a tad over 45 minutes, all counted. But all over their debut album CAROUSEL FROM HELL is the image of peeling back: “Peel ya skin back/Peel back all of my layers.” We get one surprising moment of tenderness with an almost sweetly sung “I love you, I love you/I want you to stay,” but as we move along, this peeling works in reverse, the tenderness revealed to be anger, as though to say the deepest of feeling is passionate rage.
This is the kind of music you get with or you don’t. It’s hard, it’s fast, it’s ambitious, loud, a maelstrom of genres and references only someone who grew up in Crown Heights going to punk shows and traipsing on the weirder corners of the ’00s internet would want to make. In response to my attempt to explain exactly what LSP does, a friend said “I can’t keep up with the kids.” But in certain circles of a DIY scene that centers harsh noise and breakbeats—such as those familiar with what was once called The Mutants and included Deli Girls, Dreamcrusher, and Kill Alters—LustSickPuppy is royalty. Fans will have lyrics memorized within days of a drop; they’ll bark when ordered to bark.
At barely 20 minutes, CAROUSEL is the longest LSP release to date—which I suppose is what makes it an album and not an EP, like 2020’s COSMIC BROWNIE or 2022’s AS HARD AS YOU CAN. It’s COSMIC BROWNIE’s “Graveyard Smash” and AS HARD AS YOU CAN’s “Ego Bruiser” that are key to this world—a world Hayes told Office Mag was built with and for “weird little creatures who like to dance until they die.” The former is a flip on “Monster Mash,” crawling with “Ghouls and goblins, creatures mobbing.” The latter is a sex romp (“This pussy I keep it sticky”) whose zany video features Hayes as a blonde-wigged bodybuilder. There’s always humor. This must be emphasized. CAROUSEL’s final song “Chokehold” rhymes “Tamagotchi” with “Hitachi” and throughout are tongue-in-cheek quips and self-references, giggles and lols.
The LSP universe includes but is not limited to: Lil’ Kim and neon clown makeup, Foxy Brown and rhinestones, Bring Me the Horizon and silver spiderweb bras, Death Grips and latex doggy gear. They once, for Halloween, had a prosthetic hand giving the finger made as a mask. Hayes tweets such things as, “I hate being referred to as mother plz instead refer to me as overlord,” and suggests one listen to CAROUSEL plugged into Doc Brown’s enormous amp from the beginning of Back to the Future. A porn site ad-esque gif promo-ing “CHOKEHOLD”: “Are u a Sick Puppy?? LustSickPuppy wants to put YOU in a chokehold. You won’t last 2:07!!!” CAROUSEL is missing the goofy found sounds and allusions and some of the playfulness I so loved about their previous output, but it doesn’t lack for moxie.
Hayes floats somewhere between self-drawn cartoon character and dominatrix daddy you’re dying to please. The personality is inextricable from the music, which is breakneck and uncompromising. It’s all ego, but it’s an ego that’s welcoming, not self-centered but self-assured, one that rolls between tender outrage at rigged systems and furious sensuality. Maybe it’s not so surprising, after all, that there’s some sweet-sounding affection tucked into all the chaos.
