Machine Girl, the highly acclaimed New York-based electronic hardcore duo, have released their new album MG Ultra via Future Classic. The album is the culmination of a decade long awareness of this oft undeclared fact: what we fear about the future is evidenced in the crises taking place now. In the face of these themes, Machine Girl offers the harshest rebuke. MG Ultra, their sixth studio album, and first since 2020, could be interpreted as double entendre: a kind of manic collision between the different genres explored in previous MG releases in their most distilled, ultimate form, alongside the obvious CIA reference to the MK Ultra human experiments they began conducting in the 1950’s. MG Ultra playfully institutionalizes the battle against alienation, dysmorphia, estrangement, commodification, and the gentrification of the mind through a complex sonic narrative. The album includes previously released singles „Psychic Attack,“ „Motherfather,“ which arrived with a John Lee (PFFR, Wonder Showzen) directed video, and „Until I Die.“
Beginning in 2012, Machine Girl is a project born from the hyperfixations of its progenitor, Matthew Stephenson. Taking cues from the character of Chicago footwork and a semblance of hypermobile, wide-ranging cultural references that stem from digital cultures, Machine Girl has been interchangeable with DIY culture, a lo-fi sound with a distinctly hi-fi, maximalist cultural vision. These are tracks for a generation with a hunger for stimulation, owing as much to the frenetic sound of metal and hardcore as they are a love letter to electronic “hardcore”. Machine Girl draw together the lesser known genres native to web 1.0 into a breakneck act that actualizes most clearly in their notorious live performances. The mediums, as various as they are, are the message. In contrast to traditional artist-audience hierarchies Machine Girl has grown to inescapable underground popularity by shunning traditional visibility, remaining close to the scenes and punk ethos integral to the communities they were birthed from.
