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.
