In the world of the fast-paced, first-person shooter Neon White, you play as a masked sinner temporarily freed from Hell, tasked with clearing Heaven of a demon infestation in the hopes of earning freedom from eternal shackles. Each level is a flurry of speed and violence; your goal is to surf through a little corner of paradise and eliminate whatever monsters may await you. Every frantic moment, every hairpin twist and trigger pull, is soundtracked by stuttering breakbeats and twisted electronics from the New York band Machine Girl. It’s a great fit—in the decade-plus that Matt Stephenson has been working under the Machine Girl name, few have made music as supernaturally chaotic and disorienting. His songs’ unrelenting pace and labyrinthine structures make them the perfect accompaniment for fighting a spiritual war.
These themes were on Stephenson’s mind again while making Machine Girl’s seventh full-length, PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X, which turns its gaze on, in his view, “a very psychologically damaged culture and society.” According to Stephenson, the only way we can push back on the degrading forces that shape our world—social media and technology chief among them—is by taking a battle stance against our hard-wired programming. “Any chance of resistance against these systems starts in the mind,” he said in a statement.
In practice, that means 14 tracks of digitally thrashed and distortion-scoured mutations of noise rock, nightcore-d EBM, hardcore (of both the punk and techno variety), and other extreme music microgenres—often jumpcutting between sounds and styles within a single track. Stephenson never gets a moment of rest; he’s always trying to jam the accelerator through the floor. In some sense, this is how he’s always operated, but the approach has rarely felt as focused as it does on PsychoWarrior. Aided by longtime drummer Sean Kelly and new guitarist Lucy Caputi, Stephenson storms through these tracks with purpose and conviction.
Even when the record’s at its most frenetic—like the shapeshifting, redlining “Down to the Essence”—there’s a sense of careful plotting that isn’t always so apparent in music this unsettling. After darting between distended noise-rap and blistering breakcore, the clouds of static part: “All day all night you ignore reality,” Stephenson screams. “So get down to the essence of the answers that you seek.” It’s an anthem for searchers and freaks, the kind of chorus that Trent Reznor has led arenas full of misfits to shout along with for decades.
But while Machine Girl unfurl torrents of gloomy noise outlining society’s ills, they’ve never got a totally straight face. Their videos and iconography—replete with video game references and goofy collagist art—betray a surrealist sensibility and prankish humor lurking under the surface of their music. They bring it closer to the top on PsychoWarrior, straining a Smashing Pumpkins reference (“Despite Having No Money at All I’m Just Another Rat in the Mall”) and adopting the fetish of being eaten alive as a metaphor for staring into the abyss (“Ignore the Vore”). They undercut the record’s heaviest moments with glittery synth lines that wouldn’t feel out of place in ’90s Eurodance, and there are shoutouts—on two separate tracks—to Looney Tunes characters. On the one hand, this smirking approach is disorienting and intense; on the other, it offers another way to confront a world that feels more overstimulating by the day. You can quietly circle the drain, or you can choose to fight back with absurdity of your own.
