Japan’s hardcore history has always travelled a stranger path to the West. Stories spread through xeroxed flyers, dubbed cassettes, untranslated anecdotes, bootleg LPs with dubious provenance, and memories passed from tour veterans to basement show kids. For many, the legacy of Lip Cream lived at the center of that fog — a band whose influence was undeniable, yet whose actual recordings were often a rumor, an import bin miracle, or a tape dub-of-a-dub that changed hands ten times.
Today, that changes.
One of the most formative and fiercely influential Japanese hardcore/punk bands of the 1980s are receiving their first-ever fully authorized reissues, courtesy of Relapse Records. The entire catalog has been newly remastered and is streaming now, with multiple physical formats arriving December 19, 2025. This is not a token repress. This is a correction of history.
Relapse worked directly with surviving original member Minoru, conducted interviews, reviewed archive material, and assembled the definitive catalog presentation, bringing previously inaccessible releases to Western listeners for the first time. If you know, you already understand the magnitude. If you don’t — consider this the invitation.
The Catalog
The reissue campaign includes the band’s landmark LP Kill Ugly Pop, the foundational Lonely Rock and Night Rider More Than Fight! 7″s, the cult-favorite Big Foot cassette, 9 Shocks Terror, Close to the Edge, the deeply intense —SIN—, and Thrash Til Death, plus key comp and ephemera context.
For collectors and lifers, the jewel of the series is the Lonely Rock Deluxe Boxset — limited to 900 copies, exclusive to Relapse.com, and pressed entirely on glow in the dark vinyl. The set contains:
All 6 LPs / 12″s
Both Lonely Rock and Night Rider More Than Fight! 7”s (boxset exclusive)
Replica flyers, posters, patches, pins, stickers
Extensive liner notes & archival documentation
It’s the kind of release that, 20 years ago, you might have assumed would never happen.
Why LIP CREAM Matters
Formed in 1984, Lip Cream were lightning-strike timing: the moment when Japanese punk mutated into something harder, louder, less beholden to any Western model. Their music sharpened the speed and rawness of early U.K. crust and hardcore into something wired, physical, and uniquely Japanese. They toured relentlessly, documented obsessively, collided with Chaos U.K., Gauze, Outo, Death Side, and countless others in the furnace that shaped one of the most mythologized punk scenes in the world. Lineups shifted. Tensions cracked. Internal gravity pulled them apart by 1990. They burned fast and left a crater. Roughly 36 years later, we can finally hear the work as it should be heard.
Legacy, Loss, and Return
The reissue project arrives in the shadow of loss: guitarist Naoki passed in 2021, and drummer Pill in 2024. The timing lends weight — this is preservation, not nostalgia. It secures the band’s impact in a medium that won’t disintegrate like tape oxide or vanish into auction-site obscurity. The final line of —SIN— reads:
“We’re all sinners. Pay for your own sins.”
There is no better epigraph for a band whose influence still echoes through basements, rehearsal rooms, and stages worldwide — sometimes loudly, sometimes invisibly — but always unmistakably. The fog clears. The archive opens. The tapes return. Listen and pre-order here. Lip Cream lives again.
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