MG Ultra

If you took every single genre of mosh-pit-geared music, chewed it up, and spit it back out, the resulting wad might sound something 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 some finger-blistering bullet hell, Stephenson’s curdled screams clashing with Kelly’s battering-ram drums in an onslaught of cyberpunk sewage. Together they channel the pent-up energy of an isolated generation reclaiming raves for themselves, and like their forebears in Atari Teenage Riot, they make aggressively dystopian albums that revel in maximalism.

Their music is never more alive than it is at their concerts, where Stephenson’s arcade-game sonics all blend into a nightmarish barrage of tinnitus-inducing frequencies. On record, it’s trickier to translate. Though the two have dialed up their production quality bit by bit, the music has mostly settled into a familiar rhythm ever since 2017’s …BECAUSE I’M YOUNG ARROGANT AND HATE EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR. Following some high-profile gigs, including touring with 100 gecs and soundtracking a first-person shooter game, their latest, MG Ultra, arrives via Future Classic, making Machine Girl labelmates with the likes of Flume—a career move that could suggest the duo is attempting to take its renegade routine to the next level.

Yet while MG Ultra makes a few slight gestures at a more polished version of Machine Girl, by and large, it’s business as usual here, with Stephenson and Kelly hurtling through track after overloaded track. “Sick!!!” continually ratchets up its hardcore attack: “I roll my thoughts up and smoke them,” Stephenson howls in a paranoid panic, declaring himself “at war with the cerebral assassins” until the song finally reaches an all-out gabber meltdown. It’s an overwhelming assault on the senses, but the constant glut of effects ultimately ends up dragging the track down, keeping it from hitting as hard as it should.

Most of the album offers slight updates on Machine Girl’s M.O.: “Until I Die” imbues their usual drum’n’bass assault with cleaner vocals, while the jungly “Schizodipshit” details the nihilistic mindset of a blackpilled school-shooter type. For all the songs’ blunt impact, there’s so much focus on cramming the midrange that any dynamics get lost in the process. “Motherfather” marks the most drastic new direction, incorporating a slow, grungy guitar chorus for a rallying cry against disappointed parents everywhere. “Motherfather/Motherfather/I’m not your boy/Motherfather/Motherfather/Why did you bother at all?” Stephenson howls; you can practically see him slamming a door covered in Serial Experiments Lain posters in their faces. The glitchy electronics of the verses are too disconnected from everything else to completely work, but it does carve out new space in Machine Girl’s angsty universe.