“You are the hell that I made for myself,” repeats Lip Critic frontman Bret Kaser on ‘Two Lucks’, the opening track to the band’s second album ‘Theft World’. An anxious, self-lacerating spiral, the song throws you straight into the album’s 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.
It’s hard not to draw a line from that mindset to the real-life fan who stole Kaser’s identity and made hundreds of purchases in his name. When the band eventually tracked him down, he was wearing a Five Nights At Freddy’s 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 ‘Theft World’.
That tension runs through every track on the album. Since breaking out of New York’s underground in 2024 with ‘Hex Dealer’, 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 ‘Theft World’, that signature chaos feels newly focused, the noise mirroring the mental instability and anguish at the album’s core.
Back in 2024, Kaser told NME that their music is “the sound of us trying to make the most visceral, poppy, sweet candy moments and the darkest, disgusting, viscerally gross moments too”. Here, it’s captured on ‘Jackpot’, where a Death Grips-style beat stutters like a casino floor short-circuiting, while the climax reaches Cronenberg levels of gore: “Pull the zippers out / Hidden underneath my skin / Coin pouch and her allowance”. It’s gross and thrilling and weirdly catchy all at once.
Tensions peak at ‘Legs in a Snare’, one of the album’s most emotionally exposed moments. Beneath the blown-out production and spiralling repetition, there’s something almost painfully direct in lines like, “So I’m taking down the pictures / And I’m packing up the clothes,” where collapse feels domestic and immediate rather than abstract. Meanwhile, the refrain of ‘200 Bottles On Eviction’ lands cold and indifferent, like a final verdict. By the time Kaser repeats “I lost myself”, the record reaches an acceptance of total vulnerability.
It’s brutally clear that even after your money, privacy and sense of self are taken, life in ‘Theft World’ keeps going, indifferent to whatever you’re feeling. Yet it’s that sense of twisting bleakness into something that sounds thrilling is what makes the album so effective. Lip Critic take the horror of Kaser’s very personal trauma into something strangely communal and alive. Rather than just documenting, they place you right in the centre of the chaos – and you’ve got to sit with it, no matter how weird things get.
