Lip Critic opened Theft Saga at their most unorthodox venue: Yong Xin Tan Laundromat in Bushwick. 3rd Space helped liaise with the owners, whom Kaser describes as “really chill,” though he was worried that the show might turn out to be a massive blunder (after all, there were still neighborhood residents finishing up their linens not long before doors). “I had a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we didn’t think about this at all … But luckily it went very smooth.”
Pop Music Fever Dream, a.k.a. PMFD, make doomy post-punk topped with wry lyrical commentary on modern alienation. Opening for Lip Critic on night one of Theft Saga, frontperson Tim Seeberger made full use of the laundromat space, at one point toting a bag of clothes over to one of the washer units and enlisting nearby audience members to help load — all while continuing to shout their lyrics with an eerie intensity.
If you’re an opening act trying to prime the room for the chaos of a Lip Critic show, it helps to get physical. When two members of PMFD knelt on the laundromat’s lineoleum floor and shredded on their instruments, the crowd went wild.
Kleitz gets into the groove. “It’s really tough to maintain practicing all the time, making this a full-time thing when you’re not on tour. So we just try to get in a room and practice as much as possible to really drill these songs in,” Eberle notes. “We stretch a lot before the shows, that’s really important.”
Though it rarely happens, Lip Critic aren’t worried about encountering an unreceptive audience. “We have obliterated our ability to be embarrassed years ago,” Kaser says. He likens a Lip Critic concert to a vaudeville routine: “We’re here to make you laugh, and if you’re not gonna laugh, we’re at least to have you go back to your job the next day and go, ‘Oh, my God, I saw the worst band I’ve ever!’”
“I feel like we’ve done tours where we were very new to the crowds, but because of the energy that we were feeding them, by the end of the set, even if it’s a bunch of 45-year-old men, they’re like, ‘Oh, dude, this is hard,’” Eberle says. “It inspires us to go even harder,” Kleitz agrees. “[If] there’s 25 people here and none of them look like they’re going to enjoy this, I have to play the best set I’ve ever played.”
Eberle crowd-surfs at the laundromat. Before they hit the stage, Lip Critic follow the necessary steps to get their adrenaline pumping. “No matter how tired we are, when the bell rings and we have to start the show, everybody is ready to jester out,” Kaser says. “I’ll be asleep 15 minutes before the set, and then it’s time to go, and all of a sudden I feel like I’ve just drank five Red Bulls.” Sandvig might indulge in a cherry cola Celsius before call time, which Kaser disapproves of. “I can’t endorse this,” the frontman says. “It induces some kind of traumatic flashback every time [I drink one].”
Balaclava, the opening act for the second night of Theft Saga at downtown Manhattan’s Spring Bar, strode into the basement with swagger and confidence. Their off-kilter thrash metal sound recalls bands like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s own scuzzy forays into metal. Like true professionals, they primed the buzzing crowd for Lip Critic (and performed some pull-ups, too).
Theft World was inspired by Lip Critic’s typical affinities — Skrillex, Raider Clan, Death Grips, and more — but Kleitz says that the actual sound of something being stolen influenced the record too. “The bit-crushing or the bitrate-downsampling that happens when you YouTube-to-MP3 something inspired the way we were sort of recreating a lot of those sounds digitally,” Kleitz notes. He adds that he didn’t subscribe to any streaming platform until a few years ago: “I had been basically torrenting and pirating every single record I’d ever listened to up until that point. There were a lot of records where I had never heard the full fidelity version of a record until a few years ago because the bitrate of the record [was so low].”
Lip Critic note that Theft World likely contains the least amount of samples of anything they’ve done. Still, they pulled together elevator tones, clipped rockabilly riffs, and sounds from livestreamers to build out the album’s universe. “I won’t tell you where it is,” Kaser says, “But [we sampled] a Twitch streamer going through a haunted house with his girlfriend … It’s the sounds of them screaming, and then also the mic they’re recording with is just getting clipped the whole time … It just sounds like jet engines.” Let the scavenger hunt commence.
“Talon,” the third single from Theft World, exists in over 18 iterations, and the band has been playing it for audiences since last year. “I think it’s one of the best songs we’ve ever done,” Kaser says. “We had a lot of input on it, which was awesome, because usually we’re super insular, and we were just at this point where we thought it was done…. [and then] I did 18 versions of the song and broke my brain. But I think it’s gonna be one that we play forever, probably.”
Lip Critic love to reunite with the friends they’ve made across the world when they’re on tour, but New York will always be home. “It’s really tough for a New York show to not be good. There have been occasional flubs, but those are extremely occasionally,” Eberle says. He mentions one show last year in Manhattan that made them wonder, “‘Did we fall off?’” “And then we played TV Eye the next day and it was the best show we’ve ever played in our entire life.”
Lip Critic are no strangers to onstage malfunctions; Kleitz once performed with a bloody nose, Eberle has broken a microphone on his head, and for a while, there was a running joke that Kaser’s entire setup would get unplugged every set. “We intentionally inject risk into the set as it is because that’s part of what makes live music so tantalizing … at any point, you could just completely scuff the whole performance,” Kaser says. “Horses don’t stop.“
At all Lip Critic shows, it’s BYOS —bring your own shirt. Kaser screenprints his designs onto fans’ T-shirts for free, and at the boxing ring finale show, they also sold a series of “objects that have really bad energies around them,” as Kaser puts it. “We need to get rid of them. My grandma held one of them and her pinky turned black and fell off.
Opening act MX LONELY brought the house down and called for trans liberation before performing their hit track “Big Hips” from their debut album, All Monsters. Later on, vocalist Rae Haas was spotted crowdsurfing during Lip Critic’s set, looking euphoric.
Since both Theft World and their previous album, Hex Dealer, involve semi-conceptual backstories, many might label Lip Critic as a concept band. They’re quick to shrug the categorization off. “We have always thrived in this pocket where we build characters and narratives,” Kaser says. “It’s a balance … We’re not really at a point where we feel like we have a defined formula of how we want to do things.”
Like the superfan who stole Kaser’s identity, Lip Critic aren’t immune to a little looting here and there. Kaser once stole a chayote squash for a Mesoamerican-inspired dinner; Sandvig gave “a better life” to a Luigi Pez dispenser found at a party; Kleitz has been known to treat the Whole Foods hot bar like an all-access smorgasbord (“It should be allowed, I think”); and Eberle lifted an entire drum kit from his alma mater, SUNY Purchase, as a gift to a friend. “My friend needed a drum kit,” Eberle recounts. “He drove from Staten Island to Purchase, and drove home with the drum kit.”
Sandvig calls Lip Critic a circus act, and they’ve also referred to themselves as “trying-core.” “Slacker rock bands want to seem like they’re born cool,” Kaser says. He sees Lip Critic as the opposite: “The veins are popping out our necks and [we’re] trying so hard to entertain you and have fun. We really do not care if people move or they don’t … We’re still going to absolutely lose our minds every single night for six weeks in a row.” He adds, “Being cringe is the price of being passionate.”
Lip Critic are open about the risks of touring during the affordability crisis. “We’ve operated at a loss [before], and now we’ve gotten to the point where we’re basically just breaking even. All of us still have to work,” Kleitz says. “If we want to go to Europe, we are basically guaranteed to lose money, and we have to decide if it is worth it to put ourselves in front of those audiences. I think it is … and it makes life kind of worth living. We’re very fortunate and lucky to be even in a position to be able to do something like this.”
“I’m not here to make background music,” Kaser declares. “With algorithmic streaming culture and music that has to be a little inconspicuous … we’re here to go directly against that, to be entirely vibrant in ourselves and celebrate being alive and celebrate living without dimming ourselves down.”
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