Posts Tagged ‘Lip Critic’

Lip Critic return with two new singles ‘Mirror Match’ and ‘Second Life’

Posted: 11 July 2025 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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NYC’s Lip Critic return with their first new music since last year’s acclaimed Hex Dealer – which Consequence of Sound described as “a cannonball to the chest” and Paste compared to “the B-52s on ketamine”, while we here at Aural Aggravation  said was “Lip Critic’s definitive statement”. Double singles ‘Mirror Match’ and ‘Second Life’ are out now and continue Lip Critic’s furious experimental energy, born in a flash of cosmic coincidence and baseball-fueled mysticism.

‘Mirror Match’ is a twitchy, high-octane confrontation with your doppelgänger, arriving alongside a bespoke Lip Critic-designed pinball game set in a cloning facility. ‘Second Life’ throws the chaos into bass-heavy nightmare territory, accompanied by a surreal music video styled like an off-brand cooking show episode, complete with Sandra Lee-inspired semi-homemade absurdity.

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"We were on tour near the end of 2024 and had just played our LA show. We had a two day gap before our next show in Santa Ana so we got a room at the hotel Casa Grande. That night after the drive I fell asleep watching Randy Johnson highlight reels. All the great moments from his time as a Diamondback, as well as his years on the Yankees and the Giants.

That night I had a dream I met a tall man with a body made entirely of radiant light wearing a baseball cap. He opened his arms and from them came two perpendicular rays that shot around me to form the shape of a diamond. When the tips of the rays connected I was engulfed in a thunderous sound, like that of a waterfall. It shook me so much that I woke up in a jolt. I woke to see that I had been writhing in my sleep and had completely displaced the other 3 members I had been sharing this queen bed with.

I apologized and brushed it off as another bad dream brought on by a late night binging baseball history videos on YouTube. Upon checking my phone, I saw I had received a text in the night from a number I didn’t recognize, offering us two days of unexpected studio time.

When we arrived at the studio that day, he opened the door wearing a fitted baseball cap, towering over our band with an average height of 5’8”. I instantly felt a familiarity. As he showed us around I felt a sense of having returned, like visiting your old elementary school once again for a younger siblings’ graduation. He led us to the control room which was equipped with a speaker system large enough for a room quadruple the size. He stood at one corner and I sat in a chair directly opposite. The square room shifted to a diamond by our perspectives.

He turned the speakers up and without hesitation played us through a whirlwind of different music at an unbelievable volume, and I was engulfed in a thunderous sound, like that of a waterfall. ‘Mirror Match’ and ‘Second Life’ were two tracks made and completed in the two days at his studio."

Lip Critic are touring extensively across the US this summer with headline dates, festival appearances, a co-headline run with Hello Mary, and support slots for MSPAINT, Pat and the Pissers & Mannequin Pussy.

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Lip Critic – Hex Dealer

Posted: 17 May 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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Partisan – 17th May 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

It feels like no time at all since I was reviewing the cassette release of Lip Critic II, and that their ascent from self-released EPs and cassette-only albums on microlabels has been astoundingly rapid, but time has a way of playing tricks when it comes to perception: Lip Critic II was, in fact, released almost four years ago. And now, signed to Partisan and having gained significant traction playing SXSW, with the NME claiming bragging rights for giving them a cover feature a few months ago, as well as a five-star review last November, they’re certainly breaking through. There’s no question that it’s entirely deserved, either: despite being overtly weird and clearly non-mainstream, they’re a quintessential cult alternative band, the likes of which gain substantial hardcore followings and are revered long after their passing.

With a lineup consisting of two drummers and two synths, Lip Critic are no ordinary band, and they produce no ordinary music, and Hex Dealer is a schizophrenic sonic riot. It’s a bit cleaner, the production rather more polished, but fundamentally, it’s the same deranged percussion-heavy cacophony that Lip Critic have always given us, and it’s still true that most of their songs are short and snappy – around two-and-a-half minutes. Consequently, Hex Dealer is aa succession of short, sharp shocks, like poking a socket with a wet finger. The whole thing is a spasm and a twitch.

‘It’s the Magic’ brings together a smooth croon that has hints of Marc Almond and some shouty rap mashed together with some Nine Inch Nails industrial noise and some woozy hip-hop beats and some aggressive drum ‘n’ bass, all in under four and a half minutes.

Lead single ‘The Heart’ is a standout, for is frenetic, kinetic energy, and its hookiness, but it’s a question of context: it’s a blissed-out pop tune in comparison to the blistering percussive onslaught and distorted dark hip-hop blast of ‘Pork Belly’, a cut that takes me right back to the early 90s, specifically the Judgement Night soundtrack. Single ‘In The Wawa (Convinced I Am God)’ is entirely representative of the album as a whole, compressing all of its warped elements into a noisy, spasmodic, hi-NRG two minutes and nineteen seconds. Crazed, hyperactive, it’s explosive and it’s unique.

It’s a rock album with rap trappings. It’s a rap album with rock trappings. It’s a mess and shouldn’t, doesn’t, work. Only, it does. And with ‘My Wife and the Goblin’, they introduce some gnarly noise which isn’t metal by any stretch, but it certainly gets dark near the end. I say ‘near the end’, but it’s only a minute and forty-one and it’s a real brain-melting mess of noise.

If the beats to grow a little samey over the duration of the album, the counterargument is that the thrashing percussive attacks give the set a vital coherence. Packing twelve tracks into just over thirty minutes, and more ideas per minute than any brain can reasonably be expected to process, Hex Dealer feels like Lip Critic’s definitive statement.

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Watch: ‘In The Wawa (Convinced I Am God)’ by Lip Critic

Posted: 3 April 2024 in Reviews
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LIP CRITIC are back with ‘In The Wawa (Convinced I Am God’, the latest cut from their forthcoming LP ‘Hex Dealer’ (out 17 May).

‘In The Wawa (Convinced I Am God),’ the latest single from NYC’s Lip Critic, combines banshee-possessed samples and furious percussion to create a sonic environment something like a f**ked-up rave that a bunch of hardcore kids and punks showed up to. This thrilling piece of electronic punk is an inquisition into the state of spiritual marketplace and the isolating results of consumption. The accompanying official video follows a band as they raid their label’s offices to reclaim their music.

Lip Critic’s debut album Hex Dealer will come out 17 May via Partisan. Behind previous singles ‘It’s The Magic,’ ‘The Heart,’ and ‘Milky Max,’ the band was one of the breakout artists of SXSW (“they made for an anarchic, categorization-defying experience that got better and weirder the longer it went on.” – Rolling Stone). The music has earned additional praise from Consequence (“hits like a cannonball to the chest”), Paste (“the B-52s on ketamine”), Matt Wilkinson gave them a 5/5 and Loud & Quiet said “the band has gone from conquering their neighbourhood venues to becoming one of NYC’s most talked about acts.” The album announcement in Feb came with features from NME (cover story) and DIY who said “Lip Critic are taking what it means to be a musician in 2024 and pushing all boundaries.”

Watch ‘In The Wawa (Convinced I Am God)’ here:

LIP CRITIC – UK TOUR DATES:

14 May – The Deaf Institute (The Lodge) – Manchester, UK

15 May – The Windmill – London, UK

29 Aug – 01 Sep – End of the Road – UK

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Watch: ‘Milky Max’ by Lip Critic

Posted: 21 February 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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NYC-based electronic punk band LIP CRITIC have detailed their anticipated debut album – Hex Dealer – out 17th May via Partisan Records. To coincide with the announcement, the band has shared the album’s lead single and accompanying music video: ‘Milky Max’.

‘Milky Max’ is a pulverising slab of electronic hardcore. The song’s shapeshifting groove anchors a sound that’s theatrical, captivatingly irreverent, and completely outside so much of modern experimental music. Meanwhile Bret Kaser’s vocal delivery feels like it’s being delivered by a cult leader who has occupied the announcer’s booth at a football stadium and refuses to come out (“All my life I just wanted to live / Now I gotta die just because of what I did”).

The official video for ‘Milky Max’ showcases a fully playable video game inspired by the song and designed by Jesse Natter (brother of Lip Critic drummer Ilan Natter). Direct link to play the video game HERE.

Check the video here:

‘Milky Max’ follows previous singles ‘It’s The Magic’ and ‘The Heart,’ which earned early critical acclaim from NME (“on their way to becoming the next great NYC band”), Paste (“an apocalyptic wasteland of NYC’s best underground punk”), Rolling Stone (‘Songs You Need to Know’), Mary Anne Hobbs on BBC 6 Music, and Matt Wilkinson (“totally essential”).

Produced in collaboration by vocalist Bret Kaser and Connor Kleitz, ‘Hex Dealer’ represents an evolution of the eclectic style that the group began cultivating on earlier projects. Drummers Danny Eberle and Ilan Natter combine breakbeats and pingy snares with heavy cymbal and tom work, creating a singular mixture of classic punk/hardcore and electronic styles. The end result is 12 frantic tracks of postmodern pop for the genreless future. A project of wide-reaching sonic and thematic curiosity, above all ‘Hex Dealer’ is an inquisition into the state of spiritual marketplace and the isolating results of consumption.

Audiences have also already been captured by the sheer energy and undeniable chemistry as they toured the US, sharing stages with IDLES, Screaming Females, and Geese, and made their way across the UK / EU including a stop at the Pitchfork Festival in Paris. Lip Critic will tour extensively behind ‘Hex Dealer’, including stops at SXSW, End Of The Road and further UK dates. UK dates are listed below.

LIP CRITIC – UK TOUR DATES:
13 May – The Louisiana – Bristol, UK
14 May – The Deaf Institute (The Lodge) – Manchester, UK
15 May – The Windmill – London, UK
29 Aug – 01 Sep – End of the Road – UK

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Watch: ‘The Heart’ by Lip Critic

Posted: 16 January 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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NYC-based electronic punk band LIP CRITIC, who are no strangers to Aural Aggro, have shared a new song and video, ‘The Heart’.

They may have switched labels and stepped things up a bit, but you couldn’t exactly say they’ve sold out.

Watch the video here:

The video was filmed in a barn in Roxbury, NY, and follows their Partisan debut single ‘It’s The Magic’, which earned them praise from Rolling Stone (‘Song You Need To Know’), NME (“on their way to becoming the next great NYC band”), Paste (“an apocalyptic wasteland of NYC’s best underground punk”) and more.

‘The Heart’ is a high-speed train of delirious percussion (two drummers!) and wonderfully demented electronic samples, weaving in and out of frontman Bret Kaser’s lyrics that inquire into the state of spiritual marketplace and the isolating results of consumption. It’s an exhilarating and singular piece of hardcore electronic punk, with Lip Critic using a broad palette of only the most extreme hues of emotion, each marked by a distinctive danceable mania.

Fresh off dates with Screaming Females for their last-ever tour and shows in London and Pitchfork Paris, Lip Critic will tour extensively in 2024. Their first-ever headline tour will kick off this summer. Prior to that, the band will play a special hometown show on 22 Feb at Elsewhere (Zone 1) in Brooklyn and stop at SXSW for a string of shows.

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Credit: Justin Villar

Lip Critic – Lip Critic II

Posted: 25 September 2020 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Recordings – 16th October 2020

New York’s Lip Critic return with their second album, imaginatively titled Lip Critic II. Now, I have a tendency – and I know it’s spurious – to associate numbered albums with prog and indulgence, ranging from Peter Gabriel to Led Zeppelin. But there is nothing remotely proggy or indulgent about Lip Critic’s second eponymous release, which crams nine tracks into 21 minutes of genre hybridity and maniacal mayhem. And make no mistake: this is intense and crazy shit, all going off in a boiler at once.

The lazy hookline would be that the album’s first track, ‘Why Not’, sounds like The B52s on acid, but more accurately, it sounds like The B52s on acid and meth imitating a fictitious Dead Kennedys / obscure hip-hop collaboration for the Judgement Night soundtrack. But none of this really convey just how frantic, frenetic, fucked-up and actually quite how wrong this all is. Yes, the world of Lip Critic is a bewildering one that absolutely defines the concept of ‘crossover’, and the closest comparison I can think of is Castrovalva, who were ace but niche and probably for a reason. It’s so far into niche crossover it’s hard to determine the level of seriousness behind the hybridized mess of noise that is Lip Critic II: this is an album that goes beyond so many boundaries all at once.

I don’t know what this is, and I suspect it doesn’t either. And nor should it: music should exist for its own sake, free from any constraints of genre. But with Lip Critic, it’s brain-bending and bewildering: there is simply so much going on, and all of it’s incongruous and seemingly incompatible.

‘Dreamland I’ is out-and-out mad, not so much a mash-up or hybrid as a multi-genre pileup with gas tank explosions and flames and wailing sirens and probably some people being cut from cars by fire and rescue and others being abducted by aliens.

‘Like a Lemon’ brings garage, grime, and industrial-strength hip-hop together with mangled beats a punishingly heavy groove that provides a backdrop to a more narrative-orientated approach to the lyrics, describing a guy with ‘A double-breasted suit and tight shorts / they’re so tight they cut off the circulation to his legs / … he said ‘I’m going to fill you up with rhinestones’.

At every turn, Lip Critic deliver mind bombs of every shape and form: sonically, stylistically, lyrically, Lip Critic II is simply an explosion. With every song being so brief, one barely has time to realise it’s started before it’s finished, and by the end, the listener is left punch-drunk, bewildered and dizzy. I think it’s good. I think it’s horrible. I think it’s a mess. But I can’t be sure.

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