Since their inception, the Pittsburgh duo Machine Girl have put upsetting images of dogs at the heart of their symbology. Some of their album covers are straightforwardly terrifying—their 2014 album WLFGRL features a blown-out image of a snarling beast, fangs bared, poised for attack. Others are more surreal, like ...BECAUSE IM YOUNG ARROGANT AND HATE EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR, which trains a video-game firearm on the face of a canine. For the cover of 2018’s The Ugly Art, vocalist and producer Matt Stephenson said he wanted to make “a fucked up Deep Dream sort of image but with dogs,” and so he stitched together a bunch of pictures of gnarled beasts to make a dizzying collage in the shape of an even bigger dog. U-Void Synthesizer, the duo’s newest album, continues this tradition, editing a regal image of a pup into a demonoid monster wearing a spiked collar that reads “GOODBOY.”
The music has changed a lot over the years—from Stephenson’s solo experiments in the early days of the project to the crushing noise and shredded EBM punk he started making once drummer Sean Kelly joined the band—but the dogs on the covers hint at the spirit that’s united all of Machine Girl’s mutations. No matter the style, their music is designed to be unpredictable and dangerous, full of animalistic rage and uncontrollable energy. You’re meant to be afraid of its bite.
Even with volatility as one of the band’s core values, however, they’ve rarely felt as wonderfully feral as on U-Void Synthesizer. The music that Stephenson and Kelly make together has always been chaotic, but they try out more sounds and styles across these 11 tracks than seems possible. Take the immense first track, “The Fortress [The Blood Inside]”: In just under four minutes, Stephenson and Kelly squeeze in ecstatic trance synths, grinding noise-punk passages, open-hearted sacred-music harmonies, gargly grindcore vocals, half-stuttered rapping, and, yes, the sound of a barking dog.
Most of the record operates at this blistering pace. Other tracks meld together mutant dance music with cacophonous noise (“Scroll of Sorrow”) or slam samples from bad translations of the Star Wars prequels with glitchy metal refractions (“Batsu Forever”). Even more straightforward songs, like the minute-and-a-half blitz of “Kill All Borders,” are arranged in such a way that they’re blurry and bewildering too. Kelly plays his kit with a sweaty intensity that has often invited comparisons to Lightning Bolt’s tunnel-vision pummeling, and Stephenson’s in-the-red electronics leave little room in the margins of the tracks for any stray thoughts. U-Void Synthesizer is meant to totally consume you.
This sort of kitchen-sink approach to heavy music isn’t a totally new one. Avant-minded metal acts like Liturgy have often experimented with deliberately overwhelming arrangements, as have artists like Bonnie Baxter, Deli Girls, and many of their other contemporaries in New York’s punk-minded scene of self-described “mutants.” But U-Void Synthesizer is unique in the way it echoes the cruel momentum of the modern world. Machine Girl have said that this is largely the point of their music. “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.” In their mile-a-minute music, there’s little hope for rest—just pure fear, momentum, and adrenaline for a society that demands it.
