Machine Girl, MG Ultra6 Images
“Prepare for transformation.” This phrase is written in Japanese characters beside the bloodied maw of a wolf on the cover of Machine Girl’s 2014 brutal debut album, Wlfgrl. It bears a direct relation to the lupine cover image (actually a prop from An American Werewolf in London) but, on a deeper level, it also seems to anticipate the trajectory of the cult electronic music project over the course of the next decade. “The two main driving forces,” founder, producer, and vocalist Matt Stephenson tells Dazed, “are catharsis, and a feeling of transformation.”
These forces have propelled the duo – percussionist Sean Kelly joined on drums in 2015 – through several studio albums, their sound shapeshifting from one record to the next. This makes the music difficult to categorise: on streaming services, albums are variously listed as Breakbeat, Hardcore, Jungle, and Electronic. None of these categories quite succeed in containing the whiplash involved in actually listening to the songs. Luckily, as pointed out in a recent X post, Machine Girl’s evocative album covers provide a signpost for each new evolution: the grisly wolfhead of Wlfgrl, the garbled FPS aesthetics of Because I’m Young Arrogant and Hate Everything You Stand For, the cyber-angelic, well-endowed nude of Gemini, and the demonic, spike-collared pup of U-Void Synthesizer.
On that note, the upcoming MG Ultra bears an image of a ghoulish young woman posing for a photo, with a bullethole through her forehead. “It’s a maybe-not-so-subtle metaphor for what it feels [like] in the world right now,” Stephenson explains. “Trying to smile through the hellish fucking bullshit that we’re forced to see every day, and feel helpless to do anything about.”
Traces of this grim outlook can be found across the tracklist, in lyrics that swivel between adolescent rage and a purer, more lucid pessimism about a future that lies in wait just over the horizon. Or perhaps it’s already here. “Everyone you know is getting sicker,” growls Stephenson on the belligerent track “Sick!”, and with mental health pressures rising, Victorian diseases back in play, and microplastics in our testicles and brains, it’s hard to argue otherwise.
“It’s healthy to let things die” – Matt Stephenson, Machine Girl
Elsewhere, over the driving beat of “Schizodipshit”, he sings: “You can be a schizodipshit too / Fall into a hole, follow all the clues / Everything’s permitted, and nothing is true.” From start to finish, the track explores how post-truth internet culture – exacerbated by the “total annihilation of fiction and reality with AI” – can turn a relative nobody into a brainwashed killer. The lyrics were written months before a 20-year-old man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump in July 2024, and originally envisioned someone closer to your average alt-right QAnon follower, but the IRL echoes are uncanny.
The dystopian slant of the album – pulling references from anime, sci-fi author Philip K Dick, and Carl Jung – should come as no surprise to longtime Machine Girl fans. That said, Stephenson regards it as a “reboot” of sorts, a “new beginning” for the project as it enters a new era. “It’s healthy to let things die,” he explains, although he admits that he’s not sure exactly what that means in the Machine Girl universe.
One thing that has changed since Wlfgrl, and most notably on MG Ultra, is the level of polish. There’s a new clarity and melody to Stephenson’s vocals on the new record, and the instrumentals have lost some of the “razor-sharp edge” associated with earlier releases. This reflects how he’s changed as a person over the last 10 years, he notes: “I was definitely more rambunctious, and maybe more self-destructive than I am now.” The visual element has also been fleshed out more than ever before, as evidenced in videos for “Until I Die” and “Motherfather”, directed by Bryan M Ferguson and John Lee, respectively.
Stephenson knows that not everyone will approve of the new direction, from personal experience. “What some fans love about the old shit is that it’s raw and sounds like shit,” he says. “Each time I put an album out, fans have lamented: ‘Aw, what the fuck, I loved the old stuff, and now it sounds totally different.’ Every album it’s been the same thing.” At the same time, Machine Girl has grown a cult-like fanbase online, which spills over into riotous live shows, all without a label or the usual clique of industry insiders. At this point, most of the fans are “down for experimentation and evolution,” he says. “It’s worth the risk.”
Based on his experiences, Stephenson adds, Machine Girl fans are also “super creative” and, for lack of a better word, “good people”. So not everyone is a schizodipshit yet, then – that’s good news. But how can we avoid our seemingly inevitable mutation into pawns of a post-truth dystopia, when it’s the product of the technology and social structures we inhabit every single day? “Dehumanising people is at the root of anything dystopian,” he says. “In so many ways, we’re in the dystopia – humans everywhere are dehumanised, and seen as dispensable. Look at Gaza. It’s fucked up, it’s demoralising.”
In the meantime, while real atrocities take place, there are people on Facebook “sharing AI pictures of Trump or Biden eating babies, and being like, ‘Holy shit’.” It’s a problem of widespread main character syndrome, Stephenson suggests: “Like, ‘I have the secret knowledge. Everyone else is asleep, and I’m now woke to the truth of what’s happening.’” He traces this back to the Jungian psychology that informed a lot of the ideas on MG Ultra. “A lot of it is masking the subconscious truth that they deeply know,” he says. “Which is, while of course there are true conspiracies, so much of it is chaos. There’s not really this cabal of 10 evil people who run the world. It’s just chaos, the clusterfuck of humanity.”
‘There’s not really this cabal of 10 evil people who run the world. It’s just chaos, the clusterfuck of humanity’ – Matt Stephenson, Machine Girl
Track five on MG Ultra, “Hot Lizard”, evokes a theory on the wackier end of the conspiracy spectrum (consciously or not) that Stephenson has referenced several times over the years: the existence of shapeshifting reptilians who have captured humanity’s highest institutions. But even this could be a subconscious projection, he adds, based on our literal ‘lizard brains’, AKA the part of our brains hardwired for survival at all costs. “The Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks and Putins and Trumps, and all these people that cling to power are more lizard-brained,” he says, “in the sense that they have this survival instinct.” Maybe, when the mask briefly drops, we’re not glimpsing the scaly features of an alien race, but the flawed vestiges of our own evolution.
Reptilians or not, the number of people who cause the vast majority of human problems is somewhere in the thousands, Stephenson adds. He takes solace from the fact that the rest of us don’t want to harm or exert control over each other, for the most part. “There are seven billion people on Earth that are capable of taking control and course-correcting. My optimistic outlook is that we will somehow disengage [from] the matrix of fear and hatred and divide that’s fed to us through algorithms and shit every day. There’s still hope, it’s not over yet.”
If and when that time comes, it’s hard to imagine a better soundtrack for the revolution than Machine Girl.
MG Ultra will be released in full on October 18, 2024.
