If you took every kind of machine music, chewed it up and spat it out again, the resulting wave might sound like Machine Girl. Gabber, hardcore punk, noise rock, trance, drum'n'bass, djent—as long as it's hard and fast, it's fair game for Matt Stephenson and Sean Kelly's arsenal. Their music together plays like the soundtrack to the final boss level of a toe-tapping hell, Stephenson's muffled screams colliding with Kelly's drums in a cyberpunk sewage assault. Together they channel the frozen energy of an isolated generation reclaiming raves for themselves and, like their Atari Teenage Riot forebears, make aggressively dystopian albums that revel in maximalism.
Their music is never more alive than in their concerts, where Stephenson's sonic arcade games blend into a nightmarish barrage of tinnitus-inducing frequencies. In the archive, it is more difficult to translate. Although the two have dialed up their production quality bit by bit, the music has mostly settled into a familiar rhythm from 2017…BECAUSE I'M YOUNG GORGEOUS AND I HATE EVERYTHING EVERYTHING. Following some high profile gigs such as touring with 100 gecs and soundtracking a first person shooter game, their latest, MG Ultraarrives via Future Classic, making Machine Girl team up with the likes of Flume—a career move that could suggest the duo is trying to take their renegade routine to the next level.
But while MG Ultra makes some light gestures to a more refined version of Machine Girl, by and large, it's business as usual here, with Stephenson and Kelly running through an overloaded track. “Sick!!!” constantly amps up his hard-hitting assault: “I'm thinking my thoughts and smoking them,” Stevenson screams in paranoid panic, declaring himself “at war with the brain assassins” until the song finally reaches a total meltdown. It's an overwhelming assault on the senses, but the constant plethora of effects ultimately ends up dragging the track down, preventing it from hitting as hard as it should.
Most of the album offers minor updates to Machine Girl's MO: “Until I Die” infuses their usual drum'n'bass assault with cleaner vocals, while the flawless “Schizodipshit” details the nihilistic mentality of a blackpilled schoolboy type. Despite the blunt appeal of all the songs, there's so much focus on squeezing the mids that any dynamics are lost in the process. “Motherfather” marks the most drastic new direction, incorporating a slow, growling guitar chorus for a rallying cry against frustrated parents everywhere. “Mother/Mother/I'm not your boyfriend/Mother/Mother/Why did you even bother?” Stephenson screams. you can practically see him knocking on a door covered Serial Experiments Lain posters in their faces. The choppy electronics of the lyrics are too disconnected from everything else to fully work, but it creates new space in Machine Girl's angsty universe.
