Leave your expectations at the door and strap in—Steve Lieberman, the relentless outsider artist known as The Gangsta Rabbi, is back with Hey There, Laura!, and it sounds like a war cry from another dimension. This isn’t music in the traditional sense; it’s an eruption. It’s punk, yes, but it’s also militantly orchestral, wildly unpredictable, and surprisingly intimate. The title might sound like a sweet acoustic ballad, but Lieberman doesn’t do “sweet.” He weaponises distortion, layers chaos with a conductor’s hand, and somehow shouts love letters through a hurricane of sound.
From the very first screech of feedback, Hey There, Laura! grabs you by the collar and pulls you into a sonic funhouse where nothing behaves the way it should. Metal riffs clash with shoegaze fuzz, while symphonic bursts threaten to tear through the mix like rogue waves. Lieberman calls it “militia pop,” but that barely scratches the surface. This is music that sounds like it was dug out of a radioactive landfill, baptised in noise, and sent marching straight into battle. And yet, through the mess, there’s something achingly human.
At its distorted core, Hey There, Laura! is a love song—or at least a transmission from the edges of obsession and loss. We don’t know who Laura is, and maybe that’s the point. She’s muse, memory, metaphor—a stand-in for every unreachable person or unresolved feeling. Lieberman’s vocals, rough and ragged like the underside of a scream, are dripping with yearning. He’s singing to Laura and exorcising her. Every beat is a plea, every yelp a flashback. It’s messy, vulnerable, and kind of beautiful in its refusal to hide behind polish.
What makes this track truly compelling is how it never sits still. It’s punk in spirit, but with the brain of a mad scientist. One second you’re in the throes of crust-punk chaos, the next you’re floating through a passage that feels like a broken music box spinning in space. Lieberman embraces contradiction like it’s his native language. Noise becomes melody, destruction becomes creation, and under all of it is a spark—something real and beating, no matter how distorted it becomes.
In a world obsessed with clean lines and algorithm-friendly choruses, Hey There, Laura! stands defiantly as the anti-single. It doesn’t beg for approval; it dares you to listen. Steve Lieberman is making music and staging a sonic rebellion, one feedback-drenched anthem at a time. If you can handle the chaos, there’s something honest here, something brave. And like all good punk, it doesn’t give you answers but sets fire to the question.
