While Lip Critic were touring their 2024 debut album Hex Dealer across the U.S., vocalist Brett Kaser’s banking information was stolen by an obsessed fan. After noticing that one of the items purchased was the entire Lip Critic discography on Bandcamp, Kaser was later confronted by the fan at one of their shows, who claimed to have decoded hidden messages in their music. Rather than report the thief, the band interviewed him on his theories, using them—in ways they haven’t fully elucidated—for their new record, Theft World.
“I would sell my soul just to have that thing I can’t pin down,” barks Kaser on “Drumming With Izzy.” His confetti-blast lyrics cover all sorts of thievery: Shoplifting, the predatory gambling industry, his heart being stolen. But this line really captures how it feels trying to make sense of this inscrutable and slippery album, which at once feels like a thief evading capture and an impenetrable vault.
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You could say it’s an album about the dynamic between various thieves and their various marks, but Theft World’s labyrinthine lyric sheet feels designed to confound. Beyond the comically clear-cut take in “Shoplifting,” where God informs a Gatorade-stealing child, “You’re not getting to heaven,” Theft World’s victims are often made complicit. The gambler in “Jackpot” implies some shared responsibility with the predators draining their account as they “spin the wheel with a dying urge,” just as the financially ruined speaker in “Debt Forest” acknowledges that in having “lost control” they essentially stole from themselves.
Kaser’s masterstroke is in compounding these questions of agency with his deft writing style—there are motifs of holes, bottles, and explosions. The speaker in “Debt Forest” feels like they could be the protagonist from the preceding track “Jackpot.” There’s a tantalizing sense the record might have some linear narrative, if you could just figure out how to put the pieces in the right order. The songs teem with half-drawn characters that delight in this same obfuscation. “You threw the papers in the deep fryer,” Kaser declares in “Talon,” “cranked up at 388!”
Theft World’s music reflects that shiftiness through writhing collages of hardcore, glitch-pop and industrial. At a glance, it resembles the gritty, metallic sound of Mandy, Indiana’s URGH, but this album is more of a trip to the fairground than Berghain. It’s fast-paced and brightly colored, in choices like the bouncing sawtooth synths in “Two Lucks,” doo-wop backing vocals in “Legs In a Snare,” and slot machine burbles in “Jackpot.” Kaser’s voice, less reliant on effects than on Hex Dealer, contorts into tones variously resembling Danny Brown and Gilla Band’s Dara Kiely.
But this twisting, agitated record sometimes reveals a softer side. “Shoplifting” and “200 Bottles On Eviction” have plaintive choruses, backed by sustained organs. The ecstatic “Jackpot” closes with Kaser singing dejectedly over a soft, pulsing synth melody of “those feelings you swallow down.” These flashes of melancholy or yearning give the record complexity and depth, as well as stopping it from devolving into wackiness.
There’s also a romantic thread: “You are the hell that I made for myself,” Kaser cries on “Two Lucks,” punctuating his stories about stealing with fleeting depictions of unfulfilling relationships. Is he suggesting that these relationships represent a kind of theft—stealing time and self-worth? Is it a play on having his heart “stolen”? The questions prompt interesting reflections on romance and ownership: what it means to take or lose hold of someone’s attention, and the unhealthiness that dynamic can breed. This is the best way to approach the album—as an impressionistic work that rewards the questions and ideas it stirs, rather than a puzzle demanding a solution. Its knotted discussions of agency and morality take a backseat to how alive its characters feel in this illicitly exciting world.
