Ginger Scott and Farheen Khan, the pair behind New York electroclash duo MGNA Crrrta, first met on a Hunger Games roleplay Minecraft server when they were 11. Every Saturday, the young Scott and Khan would log on and spend hours sucked into this saga of teen bloodbath. There were rituals. There were beefs. There were deaths (virtual, Minecraft-mediated).
For a pair that specialize in giddy, girly EDM and brainrot electroclash—think Crystal Castles and 100 gecs by way of Nicki Minaj’s “Starships” and Bangerz-era Miley Cyrus—meeting on Minecraft is perhaps the only logical origin story. And the best tracks on Beautiful Disaster, the duo’s new mixtape, evoke the same feeling as the online realm where they first found each other: neuron-frying yet ecstatic and all-consuming. On “Armageddon / Seventh Heaven,” Khan and Scott’s voices are so distorted that they’re near incomprehensible, like postverbal fuzz melting into the surrounding electronic soup. “4me?” crunches up Khan’s voice until it hisses like a teakettle over a plastic waterfall of synth.
Like peer and past collaborator Ninajirachi, MGNA Crrrta are deep-fried diarists of the online girl experience. “BFF” is a high-octane ode to internet friendships (“We’re twin sisters for real/In my Sims 4 world”) that captures the sugar-rush mania of staying up late and FaceTiming until your eyes cross with cascading metallic synths and stuttering dubstep. “Infinite Pleasure” appears to chronicle the duo’s Minecraft days, with references to anxiously awaiting the weekend and rising up against rivals. It’s also an earnest love song: Khan’s voice glides over a maw-like bass as she promises, “I’m holding this save forever/You my glitch to infinite pleasure.” It’s like reciting wedding vows before a Creeper priest.
Other songs are less terminally online and more reminiscent of finagling fake IDs and getting blitzed on the LES. “I’m that lifestyle/Your fresh meat/Motherfucker, I just dance,” Scott drawls on “Heels broke = died.” The lyrics are mostly nonsensical club chatter, but when Scott delivers them with Kesha-worthy sleaze, the attitude is stiletto-sharp. Crystalline jackhammer EDM complements the duo’s appeals to boundless ecstasy and endless highs; the modus operandi seems to be that good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go wherever they want.
Beautiful Disaster’s first half alternates the pleasures of chronically online brainrot and good ol’ fashioned blackouts, but its second half falls short. “I’m on a Saucer II” is fine, but it’s missing that extra oomph—the puckish attitude or the weirdly earnest gamer girl digispeak—that make a MGNA Crrrta cut unique. And the relatively sleepier final tracks, “Gimme it all” and “if u dare 2,” feel near interchangeable, both repeating a title phrase ad nauseam in glassy, washed-out vocals. Perhaps they recall the moment when, bleary-eyed from doomscrolling, you notice the sunlight creeping through your blinds; or when, upon returning from a night out, you’re suddenly morose and full of gnawing, unexplainable desires. But Beautiful Disaster is just here for a good time.
