Witnessing Lip Critic onstage is a strange magic. Having earned their stripes at TV Eye and Saint Vitus in NYC, the brash foursome landed on a sound uniformly singular — two drums, two samplers, and no guitars. What begins as jittery cool can just as soon erupt into an unanticipated breakdown or death-metal growl from frontman Bret Kaser. It’s music meant to entertain as much as experiment with, bringing about wonky chaos that owes as much to electronic and hip-hop as punk. In other words, it just makes you want to move.
Their next album, Theft World, ups the insanity, conceived while touring 2024’s Hex Dealer. After Kaser’s identity was stolen, the band discovered the scammer was really a fan who’d used his information to try to uncover hidden messages and codes within their music. Rather than turning him in, they recorded his explanation and used it to jump-start their next album. Ultimately, Theft World is about “taking something ugly and using it to make something cute. It’s about eating an absurd world and falling in love with it as you digest.”
Read more: 9 drummers on their early days, favorite players, and onstage mishaps
Directed by Colter Fellows, that world cracks open in their new “Legs In A Snare” video, where their twisted mayhem blurs into playful surrealism. In it, Kaser travels around Manhattan’s Financial District with a camera fixed to his head, devised by Fellows using Beastgrip, and meets a cast of demented characters. “This is by far the most people we have ever involved in one of our projects, so the absurdity of the situation was really hitting me during the shoot,” Kaser tells AP. “This shot [above] feels like we all just died in a bus accident together.” Get a behind-the-scenes look at their “Legs In A Snare” video below, ahead of a full tour schedule.
This whole day felt like I dreamed it. I had slept for about two hours the night before, and then I woke up, took an hour train, and was telling a set of twins to dance with a dead body.
As we were working on this character, we started referring to him as “The Specter.” A big reference was Masato Hagiwara’s character from Cure.
We were going around the financial district with this headset on for a bunch of the POV shots, and I ended up running through a line of people that were waiting to take photos with the bull on Wall Street. I scared the hell out of this women, so I went to apologize, but she ended up just asking me to take a pic of my nails for her Instagram story.
These kids were slamming on these drums. Love to see it.
All the POV shots were shot with this head set that Colter Fellows (the director of the video) put together with stuff from Beastgrip. He’s been shooting majority on iPhone for a while and has developed some real sauce with it. He’s an amazing artist/director, and we’ve been having a stupid amount of fun working on these videos.
Dawson Curtis made all the props for this video, and he killed it! We are currently trying to figure out how to make a dupe of this ball that we can sell as merch.
All of the close-up shots of people’s faces were done with this triangular array of LED tubes. It would circulate light around the faces in a circular motion that brought out all the contours of the faces. After a minute of watching it, it starts looking like those “took a picture every day for 10 years” videos.
Contact lenses are mad hard to put on. Colter had the idea to give Johnny (on the right) pink eyes and then give Aleana (on the left) one pink eye. We ended up having one person hold her eye lids open while another tried to drop it in, and it took probably 20 tries all together. Shouts out to Aleana for being a trooper. That must have sucked.
This is Colter, Mike, and Johnny, from left to right. Mike and Johnny are really the soul of the video to me. I initially saw Johnny in a video called “Moon Hoax,” and I just kind of knew he needed to be in this video. Mike was such a chiller and killed every take. He’s in a fire Sabrina Carpenter video, too.
