Listening to Machine Girl can sometimes feel like being inserted headfirst into a meat grinder; it’s an unrelenting assault that leaves you strangely exhilarated but also satisfied. Their latest release — MG Ultra — which dropped earlier this month, strays slightly from their usual aesthetics, but it still manages to deliver the sonic violence that unmistakably qualifies it as a Machine Girl album.
Since their debut in 2012, Machine Girl — an electronic duo consisting of Matt Stephenson and Sean Kelly — has been carving out a niche space for themselves with their ferociously innovative approach to hardcore electronic music. Their breakthrough 2014 album, Wlfgrl, laid the groundwork for their later projects with its erratic breakbeat grooves. Later releases have only pushed the envelope further, with more intensity, more sonic range, more complexity and more personality (especially with the use of Matt’s own vocals over samples), making early Machine Girl releases unlike and — in my opinion — less interesting than the Machine Girl of today.
As with their previous work, MG Ultra delivers a hyperactive fusion of digital hardcore, electronic punk, breakbeats, and drum and bass elements that collide in proper controlled mayhem. It leans more into a video-game-esque soundscape, creating a claustrophobically brutal soundtrack that could easily accompany a first-person shooter game from an antisocial, cyber-dystopian future (fittingly, Machine Girl scored Neon White, an actual shooter game, in 2022).
Despite this, MG Ultra might be one of the duo’s most accessible albums to date, at least compared to 2017’s ...Because I'm Young Arrogant and Hate Everything You Stand For. It loses some of the glitchy edginess with sharper sound design and occasionally more conventional, digestible songs.
Take the single “Motherfather” for example, which had a more commercial but catchy grunge-like chorus that felt like a departure from the usual Machine Girl style — it’s the closest thing they’ve made to something that could be played on the radio.
There’s a clear attempt to experiment with more catchy and sensible sounds (at least, relative to their usual standards), which, for me, results in a slightly less interesting product compared to past albums.
Beyond "Motherfather," other tracks on MG Ultra that feel like a part of this experiment include "Until I Die", a solid synth-driven breakbeat track similar to what’s off the Neon White soundtrack. There isn’t enough edge or velocity to make it as gripping of an opening thesis statement like "This Is Your Face on Dogs", the metal-infused opener from 2018’s The Ugly Art, leaving something to be desired.
The same goes for "Hot Lizard", which seems like a fairly commercial and straightforward (though typically loud) punk-rock rhythm section. It follows a predictable and muddy vocal melody that sounds too much like standard punk fare to be particularly engaging. Despite this, there are interesting lyrics about blurring the lines between fact and fiction, and the memorable claim that "even Jesus was a lizard once."
Some of the superior, more bombastic moments on MG Ultra come from tracks like "Just Because You Can," "Grindhouse" and "Schizodipshit," with the latter two standing out as album highlights, largely due to their off-the-wall, chaotic lyrics.
"Grindhouse" screeches with piercing, siren-like supersaws over a pounding, four-on-the-floor house beat, occasionally breaking into a vaporwave-esque atmosphere before plunging back into its punishing lyricism and percussion. Lyrically, Stephenson explores themes of vulnerability, domination and submission, pleasure, and desire. Undeniably, “Grindhouse” is an aggressively "freaky" track, especially with the hook, "I'm in your house and now your house is mine," alongside other more deviantly explicit imagery.
The techno-heavy "Schizodipshit" fully lives up to its chaotic title, being the only song on the album that truly caught me off guard with its unpredictability. Scattered, high-pitched synth pulses warp the track with an overwhelming sense of paranoia, mirroring the lyrics that depict a character portrait of an unstable, violent, chronically-online conspiracy theorist who has become "a weapon of global psychosis," declaring, "I’m psycho coded, I’m going god mode." In many ways, this track — and the album as a whole — evokes the aura of an antisocially violent figure that could only be spawned from the rot of the current digital age.
This almost feels like a commentary on the ongoing, festering pandemic of youthful anxiety and depression, a condition exacerbated by what an earlier track, "Nu Nu Meta Phenomena", describes as internet "bioperversion." Once a space for escapism and connection, the internet has ironically become a breeding ground for paranoia and hatred about reality. Within this context, the electronic violence of the song reflects what festers in these digital spaces.
There are lighter moments where MG Ultra feels upbeat, fun and catchy — particularly on "Ass2Mars," which is irresistibly groovy, like a hyper-advanced, cybernetic take on the soundtrack of a 2000s racing game. While its progression is somewhat predictable, the track boasts an infectious hook about going to Mars that taps deeply into the brain's reward center with each listen. The following track, "Cicadas," offers another engaging groove, with rapid, bright, chopped-up synths reminiscent of Wlfgrl.
Notably, both of these tracks revolve around the theme of escapism and its inherent futility in today’s world; for instance, the idea of going to Mars is impossible. The uniquely 21st century profession of starting “a crypto scam or weed business," as mentioned in "Cicadas," feels absurd. And yet, Stephenson frames it as an appropriate means of individual action within an anti-capitalist framework, where we’ve been “metamorphed [into cicadas], inside of stasis” and “caught in the lie that you actually own your stuff.” This desire to escape stems from the festering "psychoactive dirt" of Earth and the "global psychosis," posing the notions of "another world war, or the children of the COVID?"
Other noteworthy parts of MG Ultra include the two instrumental interludes, "Half Asleep" and "House Of Mirrors,” which are decently interesting electronic snippets that don’t add much in an already short tracklist. Despite having a cathartic vocal delivery and an intricate breakbeat rhythm, the closing track "Psychic Attack" is too similar to the formula established by prior tracks to really make a difference and ends the album on an underwhelming note.
On MG Ultra, Machine Girl tests out different sounds, balancing their signature mayhem and unpredictability with a newfound accessibility. But this new, slightly “commercial” edge hardly represents or signals a sell-out from the duo, since it’s clear they haven’t abandoned the aggressive energy that is clear even from the album art alone. Though MG Ultra may not reach the heights of The Ugly Art or …Because I'm Young Arrogant and Hate Everything You Stand For, or the significance of Wlfgrl, it’s still a compelling entry in Machine Girl’s discography and taps into some increasingly pertinent themes of paranoia and escapism.
