LustSickPuppy is perhaps best described as a rapper/producer wielding maniacal electronics, but that doesn’t quite get the full point across. LustSickPuppy takes their love of rap but adds a punk energy, often shouting their lyrics instead of coolly delivering them. Blending that with high octane jungle and other club style beats LustSickPuppy often ends up injecting even higher doses of adrenaline than their forebears. With their new album Carousel From Hell, LustSickPuppy is poised to make their rawest work yet. Naturally defying categorization, Brooklyn native Tommy Hayes fully embodies the perseverance and limitlessness of a Black artist unafraid of their own power and more than capable of seeing it through. Since 2019, Hayes has only succeeded at transforming inner turmoil into an incomparable and uncompromising sound. Beginning in Bushwick DIY with their first single “Goatmeal,” LustSickPuppy has always been a scholar of digital production, working first with collaborators as with their Cosmic Brownie and As Hard As You Can EP’s before gradually transitioning to working alone. Since the release of As Hard As You Can, LustSickPuppy has toured Europe three times, played Spain’s Primavera Sound Festival, performed at Boiler Room, and opened for artists Dorian Electra and Machine Girl. With Carousel From Hell, LustSickPuppy has fully shifted to self-production. “I’ve grown up an outsider and a weirdo and just wanted to feel accepted, even though I never really was,” Hayes reveals. “I’ve always felt this tense feeling in my chest that needed to come out and I had no real way of escaping it. I spent years of my life isolated in my head, not knowing who I was or how to feel and was constantly searching for chaos to make sense of the chaos I felt inside me. When I started producing it felt like for the first time I actually tangibly felt and heard all that was going on inside me.” With knowledge of their stated goals of “genrefucking, representing Black weirdos, de-centering white spaces, destruction of male dominated spaces, representation of femme producers, murder of the patriarchy, and the creation of space for POC queer people,” the distorted shouts atop the atonal frenzy and fist-pumping bass of LustSickPuppy’s work is perfectly contextualized. The songs are born of the mentality of a punk rocker who loves the energy of the club and the expression of movement, and LustSickPuppy facilitates that at each show. Without such context, listeners may be too slow to grasp the importance of the aesthetics reminiscent of Foxy Brown, Lil Kim, and even Wendy O. Williams, likely failing to truly understand just how forward-thinking Hayes’ artistic choices and statements truly are. “It is my intention to reconnect people with their emotions that have been numbed off of them so that we can return to the depths of feeling.” Considering the aphorism, “art is supposed to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable,” LustSickPuppy is a natural response to our current societal conditions, and a gift that the world would be smart to recognize as such.