“I’ve always wanted it to be, quite literally, cyberpunk music”: Why cult heroes Machine Girl are in constant evolution

“The last time we were in Leeds,” begins Matt Stephenson, put to the memory test by Kerrang!, “it was a Saturday, and the streets were roaming with soccer hooligans, guys screaming at each other across the street. We were like, ‘Oh, fuck, we gotta get the fuck out of here…’”

Luckily for Matt and the rest of Machine Girl, tonight’s show is at the secluded, new-ish venue Project House, a warehouse that will host Danny Brown, PRESIDENT and Speed in the coming months. In the midst of their biggest UK tour to date, the frontman and production architect is understandably serene after soundcheck, unwinding on a sofa with the whole dressing room to himself.

Since founding Machine Girl in 2012, Matt – later joined by drummer Sean Kelly and guitarist Lucy Katz – has been responsible for their batshit, glitchy and ever-evolving sound. Predominantly centred around high-octane electronic music, many have tried and failed to define their eccentric fusion that often incorporates punk, rave and hardcore sensibilities through an all-encompassing bombardment of sound and colour. At a stretch, 100 gecs are perhaps the closest point of reference.

Quizzing him on why he started the project, Matt says his answer today has come full-circle from its inception point. He even attaches a couple of genre buzzwords to his intangible phenomenon.

“I initially wanted it to be something like what it is now,” he reflects. “This fusion of punk and electronic music in this ravey, high-energy way. I was nervous about doing the vocal thing for a while, and I was still enjoying making purely instrumental electronic music, so I went down that path before starting to pivot over. But I’ve always wanted it to be, quite literally, cyberpunk music. I’ve wanted it to be this cyborg band, essentially, and I do feel like it’s there now. There’s still things we're figuring out, [though]. It’s all a work in progress.”

Machine Girl’s cult-like fans know first-hand how drastically their sound has metamorphosed over the course of their seven albums. For example, 2014 debut Wlfgrl is a trippy instrumental explosion of rave-led pandemonium and labyrinthine drum work, while 2020’s blistering U-Void Synthesizer channels Death Grips-esque industrial, rave-punk sensibilities and hardcore vocals. The common denominator? Hyperactive, disorganised chaos.

As both an artist and human being, constant evolution is one of Matt’s guiding principles, always switching things up in search of self-betterment. So how does he sit with the idea that neither Machine Girl nor himself will ever truly be the finished article?

“Sometimes it definitely feels like a burden, because it’s exhausting, and other times it’s a more copacetic understanding with myself and the universe,” he responds. “The shit that we’re all collectively living through right now, it makes us all crazy, and maybe feeling like the one thing you maybe have control over is yourself. Trying to improve that, maybe, will improve the world in some small way.

“I don’t kid myself that this music is gonna change the world… and world peace will be achieved,” he clarifies, letting his train of thought properly spill out in the room for the first time. “But music is arguably much more important than what any of our governments [think, given how little funding they] put into the arts. We’re all mentally fucked-up because of cellphones and social media, and one of the remedies that I definitely have is art and music.

“It’s really important, especially given all the AI slop being created – and they’re trying to push people to make stuff with that. I’ve messed around with AI tools before, and it is absolutely not a replacement for making art or music. It’s empty calories, sitting there prompting things. It does not provide the same spiritual, therapeutic experience.”

Away from Machine Girl’s prolific approach to writing and touring, Matt spends his downtime working out and playing with his Boston Terrier, Ito, to help mould routine into his life. After growing up in Long Island, his first steps with live music in his young adulthood was spent watching noise acts and footwork DJs in and around NYC. It wasn’t long before rave music and the rabbit-hole of jungle and hardcore (the electronic kind) grabbed his full attention.

In Machine Girl, however, he’s always felt removed from any particular world. Especially when they were booked at both Outbreak and Sick New World in 2023, part of two bills that were respectively headlined by the likes of Converge, Denzel Curry and System Of A Down.

“Because we’re so fucking weird, I tend to feel more like the odd-man-out on those kinds of line-ups,” he tells K!. “Not that they’re not fun, because Outbreak was super-fun, and it was awesome to get to play that environment for basically a bunch of hardcore kids. But I remember at Sick New World, I think we confused a lot of people. The vibe was a little bit more people that wanted the nostalgia of seeing the shit they were into 25 years ago, and when we were up there, they were like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”

Behind their sonic attack, however, are messages that music fans around the globe can connect with. Latest album PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X (2025) follows on, thematically, from its predecessor MG Ultra (2024), exploring the need for society to resist the mind control exercised by the ruling class through social media and technology. By fighting back, you become a psycho warrior, with the first battleground often taking place within yourself.

“[Resistance] is a universal human archetype,” explains Matt. “If you were a peasant in Medieval England, and the king is some fucked-up dude starving you and everyone around you, it was much easier to be rebel, storm the castle and actually make material, tangible change very quickly. The difference is technology is allowing that power dynamic to become so much more intense… and the people controlling our lives that have us all hostage are arguably the most powerful humans ever, in terms of the wealth and technology that they wield.”

In a landscape that becomes increasingly more frightening by the day, do Machine Girl have the answers? How does one find the strength to stop the descent into misinformation and control, having opened the Pandora’s Box of the internet?

“The M.O. of this project is we have to all log off and take a step back,” suggests Matt. “Especially with misinformation and the AI deepfake shit, it’s only gonna get better and crazier. The only true way to combat it is to be much more offline, and engage with what’s in your immediate surroundings. We’re a post-truth society, which is interesting, because it was like that for almost all of human history, because it was probably much easier to make shit up before photographs. Now we’re back there again, but the difference is you can create fake evidence. I think it’s cooked.”

Be it the metalcore-y riffs of Dread Architect tearing down our “post-industrial nightmare” and coming full-circle with the rhetoric around the recent ICE shootings (‘I’m a terrorist and a hostage’), or breakbeat-punk cut Despite Having No Money At All I’m Still Just Another Rat In The Mall referencing The Smashing Pumpkins and Pink Floyd, Machine Girl’s latest record presents a vital social commentary through the noise. Alarmingly relevant in 2026, it may yet – like Another Brick In The Wall – be proven true again and again.

“I think the MG Ultra era, at least in terms of writing another record like that, is definitely closed,” Matt says, when asked if there is more of that story left to tell. “Whenever the next Machine Girl record happens, I think it’ll be pretty different, thematically and stylistically.

“Potentially,” comes the quick caveat. “We’ll see…”

PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X is out now via Future Classic

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