New Zealand's Lips Return With "I Don't Know Why I Do Anything," Their First Release in Six Years
The story of New Zealand indie-pop outfit Lips is one with a big arc, and it actually didn’t start in their hometown of Auckland, but rather, here in Brooklyn. Singer and keyboardist Steph Brown planted the seeds of the genre-splicing project over a decade ago and simultaneously created a character to front it. If you’ve ever seen Lips perform, you know this character is hard to miss, as it’s Brown wearing a gigantic headpiece that’s shaped like a pair of red cartoon lips. In a 2012 interview, she explained that the character represents “the fact that [she] is a girl writing, producing and performing my music in an industry that is particularly male dominated.”
Steph Brown as Lips. Photo by Lula Cucchiara.
While the giant Lips headpiece and the meaning behind it may be the initial eye-catching attribute of this band, the strength of their songs has been instrumental to their longevity. Don’t take our word for it, though. Back in 2012, Brown won the coveted Silver Scroll Award, a distinction given annually to the best song by a New Zealand artist as voted by members of the Australasian Performing Right Association, for Lips’ soulful, slow-burning electro-pop track, “Everything to Me." Around that time, Brown connected with fellow musician Fen Ikner after performing on the same bill at the now-defunct Williamsburg venue Spike Hill. The two hit it off and began collaborating soon thereafter, and eventually, became a couple - thus, launching the project into its next phase.
Around the midpoint of the last decade, Lips shifted gears a bit. Actually, the project’s trajectory changed quite significantly, as instead of gigging and recording their next songs as Lips, Brown and Ikner jumped at the opportunity to score (and travel with) a touring musical production called Daffodils. The two originally crossed paths with the writer of Daffodils, Rochelle Bright, while still living in New York in the early 2010s. Ikner remembers the three “hit[ting] it off,” around that time, but their collaboration didn’t start until several years later when Bright contacted them after she relocated to New Zealand: “She wrote to us asking us if we wanted to do the music for Daffodils.” Ikner shared that Bright sought them out for the project specifically for their lack of background in musical theater, or as he put it, Bright didn’t want “a musical theater person ‘musical theater-ing’ it up.”
Lips proved to be a perfect fit for Daffodils, as what was originally supposed to be a two-week project, turned into three years of touring and subsequently scoring a film based on the musical starring George Mason, Rose McIver, and Kimbra. It’s an experience that deeply influenced the duo’s approach to songwriting. “I think both of us have always been really interested in storytelling across different mediums. So, we went to New Zealand and did this play thing,” Brown shared. “We scored, arranged, and played the music as the band on stage for three years. Then, we were music directors on the feature film. So, it just kind of took over our lives, but it was such an amazing experience that has definitely informed this album.”
Their new record, I Don't Know Why I Do Anything, definitely reflects their growth as songwriters, as the two incorporated their experiences with sound design and composing narrative-driven scores, and applied it to their own songs. The resulting compositions are quite adventurous and dramatic, making sonic and lyrical twists and turns along the way that’ll leave listeners on the edge of their seats. Brown shared that she and Ikner approached each song as if they were “creating a scene in our heads and then scoring it using sound design and production ideas as if it were accompanied by a visual piece,” a key takeaway from their extended work on Daffodils that allows their music to dig much deeper. Working with Mason, McIver, and Kimbra also served as a learning experience, as Brown remembers “while working with them [on the film], we had to go through each song and we had to make sure [the actors] really felt the emotion of the scene while recording the vocals, even if the scene hadn't been filmed yet. And that was what it was like for us doing this album. We approached it as like interpreting the songs and thinking about it as telling a story, rather than just singing the words.”
I Don’t Know Why I Do Anything captures a wide range of feelings and is driven by emotion, exploring themes of awkwardness, feeling out of place, and the uncertainty that accompanies those feelings. It moves in waves, hitting hard and fast at times, but also taking moments to step back and slowly reflect. Opening with the cutting “Heave Ho!,” the gritty and pummeling beat and Brown’s confrontational vocal stylings start things off with an absolute bang. But if you expected the record to go to 11 and stay there for the duration, that’s simply not the case. The aggression of the first track is immediately counteracted in quick succession by a twinkling, synth-driven love song called “Empty Hours,” and Lips really thrive off of these swift metamorphoses.
It’s a record of varying moods and sentiments, making it truly feel like the culmination of their half-decade-long study in narrative songwriting with Daffodils. “Sometimes I’m Afraid” is perhaps the best representation of this, as it follows the funkier, bass-driven “Take My Call” and sonically, is probably the most subdued song on the entire record, with all of the instrumentation taking a back seat to Brown’s tender voice. Lyrically, the song centers on the kinds of fears and anxieties that come with putting your art out there for others to consume. Brown shared that she wrote the track from the perspective of a “girl sitting in the next room,” second-guessing herself, “while there’s a band practicing next door,” which is why the drums sound so faint, making it much more than a song, and instead more along the lines of a performance piece. You’re right there in the room with Brown, as she’s pouring her heart out. Similarly, the album’s second half keeps the lyrical focus on the feelings of unease explored on the earlier tracks, but within the context of relationships. “I C U Wanna Know” explores feelings that are more consistent with lust as opposed to love, and it has a sultry groove to match that, but it’s probably the last danceable track on the album, as those shifts in emotional tenor carry on right until the very end. The penultimate song, “It Isn’t Anything That I’d Rely On,” is a wistful piano ballad with an explosive ending that sends waves of massive synths crashing forward. “You,” the final vignette, gives listeners time to decompress, as it’s just acoustic guitar and Brown’s sweet singing, but her words in the final verse supply the record’s most affecting moment: “All I want is to be by you forever. if I had just one wish that’s what I’d ask for. Just you.”
The record’s thematic and sonic intricacies are the result of several years of tracking and re-tracking, as Brown and Ikner originally recorded several of the songs some time ago, but then re-entered the studio during the pandemic with a new vision: “we suddenly had space to finish it and, and we had this idea of trying to give each song a narrative and that was what tied it all together. We went back and re-produced some of the older tracks with that in mind. That’s what I think finally gave the record the cohesion that it was lacking.” Brown did encounter some writer’s block, but she drew from new source material for inspiration, a new, yet to be released screenplay written by Bright: “Some songs on the record tell the story of the main character of that film.” If I had to wager a guess, I’d bet the protagonist she references exists within the album’s latter half, which documents a lovestruck soul that’s wandering around different settings, wondering if the one they love truly loves them back. Will that film get made? We can’t wait to see (and hear) Lips’ contribution if it does.
You can purchase a copy of I Don't Know Why I Do Anything on limited edition red vinyl via Bandcamp. The album is also available on all streaming platforms. Keep up with the band by following them on Instagram and liking them on Facebook.
