NYC Electropunks Lip Critic Explain Their Credit Card Statement
Including that one time a superfan stole singer Bret Kaser’s identity
Credit History is an interview series where we ask our favorite artists to comb through their credit card statements and tell us about what they bought, from the necessary to the frivolous to the outlandish.
For the digital hardcore quartet Lip Critic, strange situations tend to make their way into the music. Their new album, Theft World, began after a fan showed up at their Boston merch table wearing a Five Nights at Freddy’s hoodie and a surgical mask, and casually recited frontman Bret Kaser’s Social Security number. “Right when he gets up to the table, he just says it,” Kaser says, “And he’s laughing his ass off.” The fan thought he had uncovered a hidden alternate-reality game buried deep in the band’s lyrics and Discord posts, complete with cryptic codes and characters. Instead, he’d stolen Kaser’s identity and went on a shopping spree, including the purchase of Lip Critic’s entire discography on Bandcamp. “We were like, this is the most absurd possible situation,” Kaser continues. “We’re all okay, so we might as well do something with it.”
They scrapped a Hex Dealer followup that was nearly finished and began imagining the contours of Theft World. Kaser compares the album, out May 1 via Partisan Records, to a Brothers Grimm fairytale collection rather than one continuous narrative: interlocking stories about theft—material, digital, emotional—born from this real identity-theft episode, and expanded into a hyper-detailed universe built out of cultural “trash” and treated with obsessive care. “There’s all this slacker rock where people pretend they don’t care,” says Kaser. “We care a lot. Our veins are popping out of our necks trying to make this music.”
Forever sounding like Fred Schneider backed by Death Grips, Kaser confronts the listener with experiences of falling in love, falling into debt, and managing myriad addictions in a world that feels more and more like a dystopian scam every single day. With a sound centered on two pummeling drummers (Danny Eberle and Michael Sandvig), foreboding synths, and a sampler setting off all manner of found audio, Lip Critic records are a breeding ground for chaos and overstimulation. But there’s a surprisingly tuneful strain of clubby R&B chords running through Theft World tracks like “Shoplifting,” “My Blush,” and lead single “Legs in a Snare,” whose hypnosis-heavy video takes inspiration from the Japanese horror classic Cure. For just a moment on “200 Bottles on Eviction,” Kaser and the boys sound indie-pretty like Animal Collective; approximately three seconds later, they transform into the gnarliest, most viscerally-named grindcore band imaginable.
Theft World’s explorations of our relentlessly transactional contemporary world made them a natural fit for Credit History, our interview series that posits you are what you buy. Below are six charges—some fraudulent, some self-inflicted while shooting a video at Caesars Palace—from Lip Critic’s recent financial orbit.
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