I don’t remember how I originally found this band Lip Critic. I think I was served some post praising their first studio album, Hex Dealer, through some feed I’ve since abandoned. I think it’s entirely possible I was just advertised to and saw a product that was well-aimed at my demographic. But let me tell you. I am in whatever demographic this music is targeting. And I was looking for a new thing to consume. But what I found was a thing that consumed me. I found my favorite album of 2024.

I see Lip Critic described in their blurb on YouTube Music as an electro-punk band but I think this is one of those where genre descriptors are useless. This is some truly infested, guttural type music and while Lip Critic definitely paints in shades of both electro and punk, they have just as much shared DNA with hip hop and death metal. It’s just “hard music”. The synths are hard. The vocals are sturdy. The samples are igneous. The sonic landscape of Lip Critic is one exclusively populated with terrible monsters and stretchy imposters hiding in piles of rotten moldy gas station food. The lyrics are written on the walls of a conspiracy theorist’s radio bunker and he’s hopped up on inhalants on day three of a five-day long crime spree that is guaranteed to end in a hail of gunfire. The music of Lip Critic speaks in overlapping tongues and static math. I really love this band. Oh by the way, this is what the front page of their website looks like right now. Look familiar?

I think I caught Hex Dealer right around the time it came out in 2024 and it just wrapped me right up in its impossibly long, knife-wielding arms. The album art is definitely attention grabbing, a white void wraps like a balaclava around a similarly mask-like face, an uncanny smile and two sets of overlapping eyes, one seemingly blackened. It’s a perfect tonesetter, and it has that much in common with the first track, “It’s The Magic” which is just an absolute bruiser of a bass synth and the bare-naked vocals of Bret Kaser who sounds, in the kindest possible way, like the guy from the B-52s. But straight and just completely pissed off. The vocals are such a perfect complement to the overall instrumental tone and the lyrics are no less appropriate, coming together to really just put the listener into a sort of “stealing car batteries to build a time machine” mood. For me personally, this is a no-skip album, but I definitely want to draw attention to one of my favorite tracks, “My Wife and The Goblin” and upbeat and highly danceable song that seems to vaguely describe some sort of camera-headed media hoarder that seems particularly fixated on collecting media that makes them feel like their “brain is a vulture” and “soul is a pig” which I can only assume to be terrible gore, pornography, and government secrets. For me one of the most captivating parts of this album is this recurring reference, made in “My Wife and The Goblin”‘s middle bit but more focal in the opening track, there’s this… Okay hang on so this is actually a thing I want to look at.

So in “My Wife and The Goblin”, we have this line:

“My wife and the goblin
They’ve been in the changing room
Green skinny legs lifting up and they’re spelling doom
My son and the mailman
They’ve been trying to kill me
Bomb in the shoe put the logs on the railway
Preacher and the vampire kissing the booth
Blood filling up putting stains in the roof
Eyes full of crust wake up in the afternoon
But I see the world through the back of a spoon”

Which is a callback to a sample used throughout the album, but which is especially prominent in the first track. The sample is a crushed found-media style recording of a clearly distressed woman saying,

“My son and the mailman have been trying to kill me for months and you know what the police did? Nothing! They did nothing! You people are gonna see the true colours of this man!”

…

So I decided I wanted to track down where exactly that sample was from, expecting to find a story about a terrible tragedy of some sort, possibly some high-profile mental health meltdown or a viral clip, maybe some arcane 911 recording from the 90s. What I actually found was an interview from Northern Transmissions where they ask the vocalist about this specifically, and it’s explained that this was a script, read by a friend of the band, and meticulously engineered to have exactly the impact it had. This is the type of aural worldbuilding that permeates every bit of this album. Give it a shot.

So Hex Dealer is Lip Critic’s first studio album, but it’s actually their third album all said, following two EPs they recorded and produced on their own before signing to Partisan Records. To be completely honest, some of the stuff on their earlier two albums is still a little soft in the middle for me at times, but it’s uncanny how many elements of their style came out fully-formed on these two earlier albums, titled Kill Lip Critic! and Lip Critic II. Especially by the time we get around to the latter, we get tracks like “Like a Lemon!” which is just straight up one of my favorite songs by this group period. When I hear lyrics like “Blood turns tangy like a lemon, blood turns sweet like a lemon, whole world looks like a lemon” I get down hard. I boogie. I windmill my arms like I’m in a mosh pit when I am, in reality, driving my car at 80 miles per hour down a residential street, because this is just that type of music.

They followed Hex Dealer up with a double single release of Mirror Match/Second Life and these two songs show more experimentation with the vocal chopping which is something I just can’t get enough of. I love the new Boards of Canada track “Father and Son” for the same reasons, but that’s beside the point. Both of these tracks carry on a lot of the spoon-bending stress-intoxicated spirit of Hex Dealer and begin to blend in a little bit more of a pulpy sci-fi thing at times but it all comes together really nicely and fits well into the setting that Hex Dealer so strongly establishes. The same carries into their newest album, Theft World, which I encourage you check out in your own time. I’m not even going to tell you which tracks “stand out” for me here because honestly, this is another no-skip and you should just start at the beginning.

One last thing I wanted to shout out before I wrap up, an earlier version of their website had this janky-ass pinball game and I found a place you can, as of time of writing, play it, so check it out before the link rots: https://lip-critic.pages.dev/

Thanks for reading. Take care.