Photos by Signe Pierce
Machine Girl despises the internet we all find ourselves trapped in.
Formed in 2012, the duo of producer/singer Matt Stephenson and percussionist Sean Kelly extracted the chaos of online existence into whacked-out, glitchy electronic music that covers what feels like every genre tag of music one could find online, from industrial to footwork to the kind of early ’90s jungle you might unintentionally discover while playing an N64 Bomberman game. Every aspect of the band speaks to this aesthetic: Their record covers look like hellish screenshots from malware first-person shooters that never came to exist; early “hits” like “Uzumaki” use a frenetic pace that immediately asks if the listener is down for the ride, constantly switching styles at a breakneck speed.
Their sound is undeniably shaped by growing up with unlimited internet access, exposed to the raw frontier of image boards, shock sites, and Limewire. Earlier videos like “Bitten Twice” look like a visual virus mashing up clips between Newgrounds, Windows Movie Maker-built anime music videos, and actual snuff films. “Every friend group had that horrible older brother who already knew about the worst, most messed-up stuff on the internet,” Stephenson recalls. “You’d be at your friend’s house, and they’d show you a guy literally killing himself.”
“We got to see a bit of that golden age, even though we were way, way too young,” Kelly adds. That pre-streaming era—where finding music required effort and hard drive space, yet still offered access to entirely new sounds—helped shape both Stephenson and Kelly’s early exposure to experimental music. This exposure ultimately led Stephenson to try making music himself, later recruiting Kelly into the project once it was underway.
Over the pandemic, Machine Girl enjoyed an unexpected uptick in listeners and fans thanks to TikTok. Though never meant to be anything more than an intro to the record, WLFGRL’s “MG1” almost seems engineered to blow up on the platform due to its ethereal instrumentals and extremely dramatic sample taken from the band’s namesake movie. Hoards of young people lip-synced “He’s right…I am a murderer. But until six months ago, I was just an ordinary girl” in countless videos of girls and guys looking hot, complaining about the piercings they couldn’t get.
“It’s the furthest thing I would have ever imagined seeing when I made that track,” Stephenson says. “The fact that it had happened almost 10 years after I made that is so weird. [TikTok’s] really given all of this older music a new life, where kids are now discovering it. It kind of sucks that labels are telling artists, ‘You gotta go viral on TikTok or you’re fucked!’ I’m just glad it happened to us almost by accident.”
Through most of the pandemic, Stephenson kept his head down, focusing on projects adjacent to Machine Girl, particularly the soundtrack for the hyperactive, part card game, part first-person shooter Neon White. The soundtrack became a crucible for Stephenson to refine his musicianship. “I had this eureka moment toward the end where theory and composition finally clicked in a way I should have been doing all along. Mostly, it’s just about keeping things simple. In a soundtrack, you really want to emphasize motifs, especially for scenes where characters are talking over the music. I think in older stuff, I had a habit of adding way too many unnecessary layers. Toward the end, we spent a lot of time sitting together, asking if each element added something or if it was just cluttering the track.
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
It certainly worked. In comparison to their previous output, MG Ultra has been meticulously slowed down to put focus on undeniably “big” songwriting. The album is still loud and mean enough to scare the shit out of your parents, but it’s also filled with plenty of catchy-as-hell rave stabs that could set a big festival dancing reasonably hard. Much like Björk taking experimental music to the masses in her ’90s pop output, Machine Girl have figured out a way to get complete weirdness in front of a lot of people. Album single “Motherfather” mutates Sega Genesis-style synths into a grungy new entity, freaking out the band’s fans with how “normal” and “pretty” it sounds compared to the ADHD-ridden electronic assault of their previous material.
But pissing off fans with changes in sound and style has always been a feature for the band, not a bug. “I love pretty shit. The fundamental sound of Machine Girl is really pretty harmonies,” Kelly says. “One of the things I’ve tried to do through Machine Girl is to combine something really aggressive and powerful but also very pretty,” Stephenson adds. “We wanted to have bigger hooks but played psychotically fast, to be catchy but not sound like top 40 music.”
Lyrically, there’s a clear desire to escape from the fucked up always online reality we find ourselves in. “Until I Die” casts those fears over constantly mutating electronic soundscapes, as if listening to a computer infinitely give birth to itself, Stephenson crying out, “My dreams are all I have while reality is collapsing/ Casting shadows in a cave as an act of resistance.”
“I didn’t decide to make electronic music for a political reason, I wanted to because I simply liked electronic music,” Stephenson says. “But I have thought more and more about how the project is becoming much, much more anti-content creator and anti-tech. I think tech, bro culture is such a net negative for humanity and they’re fast-tracking us into some horrible stupid, idiot apocalypse that can be easily avoided.”
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP
“Nu Nu Meta Phenomena” feels like a dip into idiot apocalypse, mashing up sounds that would feel right at home on the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack, with a warning from Stephenson about how fucked and far away we are from our own humanity, how tech and AI are interfering with everything we come into contact with. It’s a recurring observation. On “Cicadas,” Stephenson speaks directly to the grindset hustle nightmare: “You can listen to the beast within/ Start a crypto scam or weed business/ Welcome to the dark side.”
“I mean, I wonder what’s the end game [for big tech] here?” Stephenson wonders. “Are we going to have a Netflix thing where everyone creates their own movie, and there will be no more communal experiences other than ‘Hey check out my dream slop that I just prompted out.’ There’s this level of hatred towards artists that these tech bros and people who vehemently defend this technology have. It’s so pathetic and sad to me, it’s a huge red flag that these soulless fucking husks automate art and language before anything else.”
As big as MG Ultra sounds, the group’s anger remains palpable as ever, trained on those hellbent on controlling thought and information via the internet. Standout track “Schizodipshit” takes aim squarely on the horrors of watching somebody lose themselves to echo chambers and winding up schizophrenic thanks to deepfake imagery. “Ass2mars” is even more pointed, a nightmarish, techno-inspired effigy of a certain space-obsessed South African billionaire and his irony-poisoned followers.
Still, there’s an underlying sense of hope running through the record and in the band’s outlook for the future. MG Ultra embraces chaos as a weapon to fight off big-tech-assisted brain rot with a reminder of what made the depths of the internet feel so revolutionary in the first place, for better and for worse. “I don’t want to be a total pessimist,” Stephenson says. “I think I am hopeful that things will get better, I think things have to suck more than they suck now and that eventually people will wake up and fight for a better future. Things are just too comfortable for most people, and as soon as that comfortability drops out, things are unfortunately going to get way worse before they get better. But I still have hope for that.”
