Machine Girl makes rave music for weebs who’ve read American Hardcore. Long Island producer and vocalist Matt Stephenson launched the project as a solo effort in 2012, and its 2014 debut, WLFGRL, has aged like decadent toilet wine. The cover art features a close-up of a snarling prop werewolf head and Japanese text that translates to “prepare for transformation,” and that’s exactly how the music sounds: gnarly and life-changing. Across the album’s 13 tracks, Stephenson relentlessly zips among time signatures and dance-music genres, using samples from the 2008 movie Machine Girl and related ephemera (including clips from video reviews of the film and various anime) like fill-ins for dead pixels. The record’s sharp-toothed cynicism and flippant queerness are more commonly associated with punk than with electronic music, but its sound is chintzy and spasmodic, like a Sailor Moon transformation sequence that won’t stop glitching.
Stephenson put out Machine Girl’s second album, Phantom Tracks, in early 2015, and later that year he expanded the project into a duo with drummer Sean Kelly. Together they’ve made three more records, which retain the aggression and ethos of hardcore punk and the aesthetics and speed of hardcore techno. Their latest record, October’s MG Ultra, is easily their most palatable—its hooks are softer and poppier and its lyrics are more intelligible—but the group’s distinctively mangled hyperpop sound nonetheless delivers a sobering assessment of our dystopian reality. To attend a Machine Girl show is to straddle the worlds of hardcore and rave music: you’re just as likely to encounter moshing or stage diving as shuffling or footwork. And while Machine Girl’s sound and attitude are true to the underground, they’ve always aspired to connect with bigger, broader audiences. The House of Blues isn’t my ideal stage for Machine Girl—the group’s spirit and grit clash with the furniture—but I wouldn’t pass up a chance to see them just because they’re playing the TGI Fridays of music venues.
Machine Girl Femtanyl and Kill Alters open. Fri 12/13, 7 PM, House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn, $37–$49, all ages