Machine Girl

Machine Girl have always operated as an inimitable, inventive, and individual sonic phenomenon. The newly trio’d lineup—Matt Stephenson (vocals, producer), Sean Kelly (drums), and Lucy Caputi (guitar)—fortifies a punk exoskeleton with electronic alchemy and cinematic ambition, outfitted for an uncompromisingly heavy attack. Rave, metal, punk, and pummeling electronic and organic drums collide and splinter like shrapnel into kaleidoscopic blasts of vibrant color and visceral sound.

Machine Girl carved out an incomparable lane upon arrival with Stephenson’s 2014 full-length debut LP, Wlfgrl, achieving bona fide cult status through tracks such as “Out by 16, Dead on the Scene,” “Ghost,” and “Mg1,” the latter of which has amassed more than 43 million Spotify streams and counting. Their sound proceeded to completely reinvent itself across each LP that followed.

2024’s MG Ultra incited the most enthusiastic critical applause of the band’s career so far. Pitchfork professed, “Their music together plays like the soundtrack to the final boss level of some finger-blistering bullet hell,” while Dazed mused, “It’s hard to imagine a better soundtrack for the revolution than Machine Girl.”

The latter LP also set the stage for 2025’s PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra, functioning as a prelude. “Come On Baby, Scrape My Data” serves as a multi-generational war cry against AI and big tech: “Wanna know me? Wanna own me? Wanna clone me? F**k you, you can blow me.”

Their cathartic live shows have captivated hundreds of thousands of fans, with the band having already traversed five continents and thirty-four countries in the post-COVID era.

In the briefest of descriptions, Snõõper is a band who, in a 33 1/3 rpm world, make 45 rpm music they play at 78 and it completely works. 

Even at this incredible speed, Snõõper (the kinetic duo of musician Connor Cummins and visual/video artist, Blair Tramel)  is super precise instrumentally and skillfully melodic vocally, even though, again, they’re flooring it almost the entire time. The overall effect is a megadose of extremely cool and unique songs that while at the speed of tomorrow, would lose their overwhelming fun factor if played any differently. - Henry Rollins

The dense compositions of NYC-based trio Kill Alters crash into you as a glorious mess of hyperactive vocal lines, pulsing electronic textures, and interwoven percussion patterns. Primary composer and producer Bonnie Baxter leads the band with her impassioned vocal performances, pummeling drum machine beats, and peals of chaotic synthesis. In addition to Kill Alters, Baxter has released solo albums and is 1/2 of the duo Prolaps alongside Machine Girls' Matthew Stephenson. In Kill Alters, Nicos Kennedy serves as the project’s co-producer/mixer, sound engineer, and synthesist, both shaping their sound in the context of performance and rendering their final recorded output in all its overloaded detail. Hisham Bharoocha (formerly of seminal US underground projects Lightning Bolt and Black Dice, and a solo artist under the Soft Circle moniker) provides his signature battering ram drum performances, which collide with electronic percussion elements to animate the band’s ballistic compositions both on record and in the context of their live shows.

Baxter and Kennedy started the Kill Alters project as an outlet to recontextualize the audio from an archive of home-recorded tapes made by Baxter’s mother, which date from the 1970s through the 1990s. The care and the vulnerability with which Kill Alters infuses their music with these archival recordings recasts the trauma and confusion documented within them as a source from which to draw power and achieve a new sense of clarity.