With their new album U-Void Synthesizer, Pittsburgh duo Machine Girl (Matt Stephenson and Sean Kelly) revel in the chaos that forms when you embrace the collapse of the world as we know it.
Since 2014, Machine Girl have been meshing together elements of giddy electronics, hardcore punk, harsh metal, scraping industrial and gurgling vocals to offer up project after project of refined futurism.
However, on their latest album U-Void Synthesizer, the pair have completely upped the ante, blending a wide variety of genres together to form a ghastly soup to heal all woes, filled with chunks of glass and broken USBs.
Listen to ‘Suck Shit’ by Machine Girl below.
From the very beginnings with ‘The Fortress (The Blood Inside)’, you feel as if the band have gazed into the void at the end of the world, and are merely deciphering to you through sound what they saw there.
Vocals on this project flex from dark and gritty to almost rap-like and punkish, as the backing production skirts on the edges of heavy metal and rave electronic. At its most fast-paced, it feels like a neon-lit highway drive through Lucifer’s casino city, and at its slowest like on ‘Devil Speak’, everything feels like a slow-winding snake envenomed with wicked incantations.
Listen to ‘Fully In It’ by Machine Girl below.
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“I think most of what dictates our taste is pretty maximum shit because we’ve just consumed so much media in our lives,” Kelly said in an interview last year. “So for us to really relate to anything it has to be over the top.”
And over the top it is. U-Void Synthesizer is quite literally the music that punks of the 1980s were hoping would exist when they entered the distant year of 2020. Never has grindcore or electronic sounded his abrasive and destructive, but we are so glad it does.
Listen to ‘On Coming’ by Machine Girl below.
