Track by Track is our recurring feature series in which artists guide readers through each song on a release. Today, our May CoSign Lip Critic break down their explosive debut album, Hex Dealer.
It’s a major introductory point for Lip Critic, but bears repeating: How many punk bands have two drummers, no guitarists, and sound like they’re crafting one long, explosive, overwhelming electro-seance? Pretty much none, so Lip Critic have emerged with a sound that feels brand new.
The NYC-based electro-punk quartet — who is also our May CoSign — have a proclivity for high drama and surreal humor. Their music is supercharged, but also deeply weird; look no further than “In the Wawa (Convinced That I Am God),” which takes the pedestrian circumstance of ordering a sandwich at a Wawa and presents it like a pulsating fever dream.
Even the band’s responses for this Track by Track breakdown feel straight out of a long-lost dystopian fantasy series — take a gander and you’ll find mentions of cults, pranks, “Building a city out of Subway bread,” robbing a butcher’s shop (in the song “Bork Pelly”), and messing around with “farm animal DNA.” It may seem all over the place for this group of young, restless musicians, but given the confidence, novelty, and aesthetic unity of their sound, they’re no strangers to embracing chaos.
Their influences range from Slipknot and Andy Kaufman to Deerhoof and Death Grips, to video games and Soul Coughing, and a myriad of other left-field choices. They all enjoy similarly eclectic touchstones, but vocalist Bret Kaser is a huge reason these songs take such surrealist shapes.
“There’s this line that runs through all of [the songs], of absurdity and kind of depravity,” Kaser tells Consequence. “A lot of it is me pressing record and doing fully improvised runs over songs, then going back and editing the improv… there’s a lot of Monty Python-style thinking.”
Hex Dealer certainly features a loose through-line narrative, but even taking in the tracks on their own is a feat of imagination. Yes, Lip Critic are a lot, but it comes across as fearless generosity.
Stream Hex Dealer below, and read on for Lip Critic’s Track by Track breakdown.