TwoLips’ “DIE ON EVERY HILL” Lives Between Rage, Vulnerability, and Survival
TwoLips is anything but subtle. She embraces bold risks, delivers unmistakable messages, and draws clear lines around the ideas that define her work. Whether people embrace her vision or reject it seems almost beside the point, because her purpose is as uncompromising as the artistic path she has chosen.
She makes that unmistakably clear on her debut album, “DIE ON EVERY HILL,” a project where the singer, songwriter, and activist moves effortlessly through emotions as sharply contrasting as discomfort, vulnerability, rage, and pride.
Powerful and eloquent, the record opens with “RESISTANCE,” a brief manifesto disguised as a song. Here, TwoLips reinforces the central idea that our existence is resistance, an idea that echoes throughout the album.
Driven by an intense gothic atmosphere that accelerates and slows its pulse while keeping the listener suspended by an emotional thread, “CHASE THE RABBIT” serves as the album’s true opening statement. The track sustains a deliberate tension, shifting from explosive sonic peaks to an almost deafening silence before ending abruptly and without warning.
Meanwhile, songs like “CALIFORNIA SERENADE” and “DESTINY SWAP” distinguish themselves with a much gentler introduction. Both provide a brief moment of relief from the intensity of an album conceived as a platform to speak about pride in one’s identity, respect for marginalized communities, and a fierce critique of systemic injustice, expressed directly and without compromise.
“BLACK NATIVE,” “u r not safe here,” “s0ns,” and “VI0LENCE” carry the album’s themes of identity, resilience, and cultural pride in their most explicit form. Their direct lyrics are matched by a forceful production filled with piercing high frequencies, distortion, gasps, and screams capable of sending chills down the listener’s spine.
“TENTS & TESLAS,” “THE DIRT,” “PPL R,” and “HONEY METAL” further reveal how TwoLips, born Kianah LongChase, creates music deeply connected to the social and cultural realities shaping her experience as a multiracial Black and Indigenous woman of Dena’ina and Lakota descent.
Throughout the album, identity emerges as a complex, living, and constantly contested territory. Ancestry, cultural erasure, survival, and the exhaustion that comes from resisting over and over again run through every song. Yet there is also room for dark humor, satire, and moments of vulnerability that prevent the record from becoming emotionally one-dimensional.
That vulnerability becomes most apparent whenever the production lowers its guard, allowing grief and tenderness to breathe amid so much confrontation. These contrasts make the album’s most explosive moments feel even more impactful and demonstrate that TwoLips understands pacing as emotional architecture, knowing exactly when to overwhelm, when to pull back, and when to leave listeners sitting with discomfort long enough for it to resonate.
Produced by Lightfoot, who has collaborated with the artist for more than five years, “DIE ON EVERY HILL” moves fluidly between punk, rap, rave, metal, darkwave, and electro-goth. Industrial textures collide with urgent guitars and relentless percussion, while TwoLips’ voice shifts seamlessly from melodic performance to screams, provocation, and rallying cries.
TwoLips will bring the uncompromising energy of “DIE ON EVERY HILL” to the stage with a series of upcoming live appearances. The run begins with an album listening party in Los Angeles on July 24, followed by a performance at The Echo on July 31, where she will open for Big Sis. She will then join GRRRL Music at Soda Bar in San Diego on August 4 before heading to New Mexico on August 8. The currently announced dates conclude on October 12 with a performance in Arizona, as part of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Rich in darkwave and electro-goth influences, “DIE ON EVERY HILL” is a powerful, resonant, and deliberately uncomfortable album rooted in a form of resistance born from injustice rather than timid appeals or pleas for acceptance. TwoLips asks for neither approval nor consensus. She demands presence, attention, commitment, and conviction. And in an artistic landscape often crowded with softened messages and calculated ambiguity, that kind of clarity can feel not only refreshing but also necessary.
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