THIS SHOW IS AT LITTLE GIANT LOCATED BEHIND BOTTLEROCKET AT 100 ASTEROID WAY

LIP CRITIC

with support from

FLATWOUNDS

BEJALVIN

$18 ADV / $20 DOS

7PM DOORS / 8PM MUSIC

ALL AGES

for fans of... Model/Actriz, MSPAINT, Machine Girl, Water From Your Eyes

BIO:
Theft World is an album about stealing.

I’ve stolen a lot, and I’ve been stolen from a great deal. Nothing interesting has been taken from

me though, just the things that everybody seems to have, social security number, credit cards,

etc. Not long after I turned 25, while at the Lost Lake Lounge in Denver on tour supporting our

last album Hex Dealer, I got a notification on my phone that I had successfully checked into a

Comfort Inn & Suites in Amherst, Massachusetts. I quickly logged into my bank account only to

see a long list of charges on my credit card, as well as a couple thousand dollars missing from

my checking and savings. The purchases seemed fairly mundane, a lot of hotels, huge

purchases at Costco and Walmart, but one stuck out. A single thirty-five dollar purchase on the

website Bandcamp. My heart dropped, and when I went into Lip Critic’s Bandcamp it confirmed

what I was afraid of. Whoever stole my card had bought Lip Critic’s whole discography. It made

me sick. It was as if the scammer was reaching out from some abstract place into the real world,

saying “I see you.”

Seven shows later on tour we were at O’Briens in Boston. The show was an especially feral and

violent one and when we finished our set I ran over to the merch booth. A kid in the line caught

my eye, a tall lanky white kid wearing a surgical mask and a Five Nights At Freddy’s zip hoodie

with the hood on. When he finally got up to the table I asked if he knew what he wanted. I could

tell by his eyes he was smiling underneath the zip-up. After a brief pause he recited my social

security number to me. As much as it shook me, seeing him there in front of me felt harmless,

like a little kid playing a prank on you, unable to contain their excitement and watch you realize

what’s happened. I asked him if he’d talk to me alone and he instantly agreed. As soon as we

got outside he excitedly admitted to stealing my information. He exclaimed that he “couldn’t

believe the prize” he’d won. When I pressed him about why he had targeted me, he said

because I had told him to. “You hid it well,” he kept saying, “but I figured it out.” I realized pretty

quickly I was talking to someone who was not in the same world as me. He told me he was

convinced that we had been leaving coded messages and patterns in our music that were all

part of some massive scavenger hunt, and that he had won. In my head I was grazing through

all the lyrics I ever wrote, all the songs we’d ever put out, trying to understand how someone

could have come to this conclusion. The more I stayed quiet the more he filled the space with

words, detailing the parts of this grand narrative and puzzle that I had supposedly made.

After a few minutes I stopped him. I told him I had no interest in going to the police, and didn’t

expect to get any of my money back. I asked him if he would be willing to tell me the story in full

as he saw it, what he thought I meant in the lyrics, what patterns he was picking up, and how he

decoded all of my personal information from the music. He was extremely willing, and after we

packed up that night, we met him at a 24-hour halal spot. All of us set up audio recordings on

our phones beforehand, and about 45 minutes later he had told us everything.

None of it made any sense.

We spent the trip home from Boston listening to the recordings in the van laughing and trying to

make sense of what the kid had said.

The more we listened to it the more entertaining things became, and we started to see recurring

themes and characters in his rambling. He said he knew certain songs were from the

perspective of “The ATM Man” and some songs took place on Earth while others were placed in

“The Junk Space” and “The Grocery Store Casino.” I remember feeling a sense of jealousy that

I hadn’t actually concocted this whole thing. The actual themes and ideas of the music we had

made paled in comparison to this one kid's freakish interpretation of them. We got back to New

York the next day, played our last show at TV Eye in Ridgewood, and the tour was over.

A week later, Connor and I were at his studio starting to lay out our next album. A bunch of

demos were already done and we had been feeling super confident about it. But something felt

off then. All the tracks felt too safe, even boring. We had been over the moon about them in the

months before the tour but now it all just felt weak. The session was massively unproductive in

terms of music, but we couldn’t stop talking about the kid's story - my scammer’s story. It

dawned on me later in the night: let’s make his album. Whatever this kid thought he was

hearing, let’s make that. He had given it to us all on a platter. Every detail story boarded out in

the recording of our conversation.

We ended up shelving the album we had worked on in the months leading up to our headline

tour and started from scratch using the recording of our conversation with the kid as our guide.

Theft World is that record.