INTERVIEW: MACHINE GIRL

DOWNTIME WITH THE RAVE PUNK HEROES

One of the nice things about doing John’s Music Blog is that I am not beholden to album cycles or touring cycles or any of the other promotional focal points that exist within the music business. I’m fine with all of that stuff, but sometimes it can be fun to chat with an artist for no damn reason… Just for the love of the game.

Which brings me to Machine Girl. The first time I played with the duo of Matt Stephenson and Sean Kelly was in 2016. Over the years, I’ve witnessed them grow into the ravepunkdigitalhardcore juggernaut they are today. They’ve traveled from DIY floors to proper stages, and they keep getting bigger and badder and more bulletproof. Enter the pit, reach for the lasers.

It had been a minute since we last talked—I didn’t even know they moved from Pittsburgh back to New York City. It was great to catch up with Matt and have a wide-ranging conversation about everything from hardcore to TikTok to their tour with 100 Gecs. We even got into some fast-food game theory. I can’t wait for the next record.

I thought it would be fun to chat when you're just chilling and maybe working on shit. 

Totally. Yeah, you caught me at the perfect time, because that's basically exactly what's happening. Just got finished with our last tour until we put another album out and go out to headline and support that. So, we're working on that album now, but, yeah, we're not going to tour again until sometime next year. 

Are you in Pittsburgh right now?

No, I'm in New York. 

Cool. 

Yeah, I moved back and Sean moved back like, I guess two years ago now. 

Oh, nice. How's it been? 

It's been great. We were going to move back here before Covid and everything, and then obviously, you know, lockdown happened. And we decided to stay another year because Pittsburgh is so cheap and there was nothing happening anyway. And that also allowed us to save up money to afford to move back. 

And what's weird is that we actually kind of got way bigger in lockdown. I think for some bands and some artists, lockdown, you know, obviously set them back because there were no shows and it was much harder to promote your stuff. But I put all of my back catalog on Spotify and on streaming for the first time in March or April of 2020 because I needed any extra income that I could get. And yeah, once all that stuff went on all these different streaming platforms and was available on TikTok, shit just started to snowball fairly quickly and kind of just snowballed right until we started to tour again. So yeah, our move back to New York kind of aligned pretty well with that. 

That's amazing. And so it's just been a lot of touring—I saw you played Outbreak Fest. That’s a hardcore fest. 

Yeah. 

How was that? 

Yeah. That was cool. It was fun. It was pretty chaotic. But the crowd was awesome. And yeah, the main thing I love about hardcore and I wish, you know, other styles of music were similar in this way—just the audience, the energy and the passion from the audience is so awesome. And even to get a little bit of that at that festival was really cool. It was the final show for us at the end of all this touring. And we had two weeks off before that show and didn't have a chance to rehearse. So it was kind of a rough show for us. We also didn't get a soundcheck or anything. We just kind of got thrown on stage. 

Those festival shows, it's almost like you don't process a single thing until it's over. 

I know. And in that way, I kind of hate festivals, all of them, for that reason. I just never really feel good after. Like, fuck, that's just not what I wanted the show to be. Sure, it's just me being my own biggest critic or whatever. But yeah, I went into that one, you know, just trying to enjoy it, trying not to overthink it. Trying not to stress myself out with being, like, we have to go extra hard because we're at this hardcore festival or whatever, you know, just try to put on a good show. And again, because it was the final show for a minute, I was just so happy to be done. When I walked off stage and got to enjoy the rest of the fast. 

Were there any highlights, any bands that you maybe had never heard of before? 

Not that I had never heard of before, but it was my first time seeing Jesus Piece. I'd never seen them before. And they were really sick and the crowd during their set was just so fucking crazy and gnarly. It was like the most hardcore, hardcore set that I had seen. As someone who does not really go to like real hardcore shows very often, you know? 

Yeah. 

It was what I always imagined those kinds of shows to be. And because it was this giant festival, they even kind of set the stage up so that it was conducive to stage diving and people just running up on stage and shit. They had this platform in front of the stage for kids to run up and like fucking do whatever and flip back into the crowd. And for their set, it was just an endless stream for 30 minutes of like 30 kids slamming into each other, in front of the band, and jumping back into the crowd.  Yeah, it was just wild. And I didn't get a chance to see them, but I know Sean saw Soul Glo and said that their set was also insane. I saw Code Orange who also are really good. 

You've toured with them, right? Code Orange. 

We were supposed to tour with them. Covid happened and the whole tour got reconfigured and moved to a time when we weren't able to do it. But yeah, it was actually kind of funny because the whole tour package that was supposed to happen in 2020 with Code Orange were all at Outbreak. 

Wow. Yeah, hardcore is in an interesting space right now, where seemingly there's a bit of room. And then there's also pushback about that room, but there's seemingly room for non-hardcore styles of aggressive music to kind of flourish in that scene. More than, sometimes, indie rock. 

No, totally. It's in a really weird position and it's bigger than it's ever been. Turnstile is one of the biggest bands in the world now, and they’re to me kind of like the ambassadors of hardcore for a lot of people that maybe otherwise wouldn't ever uncover that world. There's so many bands now that are sort of following in their trajectory, which is also cool but I definitely can see how there are probably hardcore fans that are lamenting that.

I think there's a thing where once you get deep enough into a subculture, it's almost as if you have to find the purist manifestation of whatever it is. But, yeah, these scenes maybe have to be kind of narrow in order to have meaning. It's an interesting question to me—pushing those boundaries. I think about The Locust even in the late ‘90s, early 2000s. I don't know if you fuck with them?

Yeah, no I they were one of the first really extreme, I don't even know how you classify them, powerviolence?

They kind of pushed it, and then for me what was formative was the stuff on the edge of hardcore—there'd be these tours with maybe The Locust or Lightning Bolt, these bands that were pretty much noise rock bands, but hardcore kids were kind of into it. I feel like you almost fit into that sort of history. 

Definitely. Definitely. Especially because of the way that we came up, which was still doing the typical DIY tour circuit. And we would play, I wouldn't necessarily say that we played hardcore shows, but we played with a lot of punk and hardcore bands. 

Weird bands. 

And weird bands, I mean, we played with everything. We played with DJs, just playing techno and shit. We played with hardcore bands. We played powerviolence shows. We played weird artsy shows, you know, with performance artists and stuff. Like, we did the whole gamut of DIY. 

I was listening back to your catalog and it feels like at a certain point, probably after you’d been touring a lot, your records, they got more vocals and they got more aggressive. Was that a response to being on the road and seeing what kids kind of went off to live? 

Yeah, definitely. And also just making more stuff to play live, you know, because in the early band show days, it was a lot of playing instrumental tracks. 

Yeah. 

And then I would sort of improvise. Yeah, at the beginning, it was just us covering the old Machine Girl stuff, which was a lot like ravier and dancier. And also, there's a lot of heavy shit that I love. I mean, one of my favorite bands is Dillinger Escape Plan. It was very formative for me in high school. And yeah, I was like, I really want to figure out how to make the electronic version of this basically. And there were tracks that I would write where I would try to make these mathcore type things, but with synths and stuff.

I mean, breakcore can be very proggy. There's definitely a connection. 

Totally. And you know, ultimately, I feel like on the spectrum of subcultures and shit, like being a punk or a fucking geek or a raver or whatever, like, I am definitely a mix of a lot of things, but mostly I'm a nerd, you know, a fucking nerd. And I love proggy shit. And I love mathy shit. I'm trying to make stuff like that but also not self-indulgent stuff. I just like making weird shit. 

When you're working on music now are you tapping into these recent experiences of playing bigger shows? Because didn’t you do a tour with 100 Gecs where you're playing really big rooms? Did that change how you think about composing music? 

Totally. Yeah, it's touring with them, and we had escalating tours basically from our first headlining tour a year and a half ago, so the beginning of 2022, through the Gecs tour. We did these three tours that kind of grew in the venue sizes. We did the headlining tour, then we toured with The Garden and then Gecs and definitely by the time we reached the Gecs tour, watching them and listening to their music basically every night, there's things where I'm like, Okay, I want Machine Girl to not lose the DNA of what it is, but also make sense in playing these bigger spaces.

I think of bands like System Of A Down and other weird bands that somehow got  fucking huge, because there's obviously a lot of people that love System, there's a lot of people that hate them, and hate nü-metal, and hate everything it represents, but I still think there's the fact that System Of A Down got as big as they did and made pop music that has blastbeats and near grindcore moments—it’s a pretty beautiful thing. I'm not saying Machine Girl is going to be a Top 40 act ever but, I don't know, I want it to be something that people want to listen to. I don't want to just alienate people for the sake of making something as alienating and weird as possible.

I think within the form you've developed there's plenty of room to kind of scale it and refine it. I mean, the early stuff is very poppy. 

Totally. It's still the most popular stuff—my first album. 

And is that partially because of… You mentioned TikTok. I didn't know Machine Girl was popping on TikTok, but at the same time, it’s not very shocking to me.

Yeah, there was one song of mine off that album, off Wlfgrl, that was the first one that went semi-viral on TikTok. It's really, I mean, it's really weird and fascinating. There's trends that have happened. And there's the opening track, which is just literally an intro track with a voiceover from the Machine Girl movie. There is a trend that is mostly teenage girls, just these weird selfie videos where they mime the dialogue from that opening track. And it's so strange, you know? Because I made that in like my parents' house 11, 12 years ago or something. And the fact that I made it probably in 30 minutes, and the fact that it's this thing that has a life of its own, is just wild.

And what's even funnier is that one of the crazier, most like, Dillinger Escape Plan-style tracks that I have, that's almost Locust sounding. It's called Uzumaki but it's spelled with the Japanese lettering. Like, that's another one that has blown up on TikTok. And if you've seen any of the Grimace shake videos, one of the really big ones had that song in the background. 

You know, the Grimace thing is funny. That was definitely orchestrated by McDonald's. 

Million percent.

Because it's one of those things that would probably be better if it was more extreme. And you could tell McDonald's marketing people were like, Okay, we need this to be edgy, but not too edgy. 

Oh, absolutely. I absolutely agree with you. I feel like even if they didn't concoct it, I believe 100 percent that they found some weird influencer TikTok kid with probably already kind of like semi-edgy dumb videos. And they just we're like, Hey, we're going to send you free vouchers to go get Grimace shakes and make videos about it. You know? 

Yeah. No, I guess that's sort of maybe more how it works: you find something that's working a little bit and then that's what you spend the money amplifying. 

Yeah. Because it's like, I feel like if a guy in a boardroom tried to come up with something, it's way more obvious.

No, for sure. And McDonalds is definitely happy about this.

A million percent. I mean, kids are buying more Grimace shakes than anyone actually would have had not been for this. 

Have you had one? 

No, McDonald's for me—if I even eat any of that stuff now it just fucks up my body The lowest I can go with like fast food now is like Five Guys or Shake Shack or something. 

I eat a lot less fast food now. I think about the amount of shit I used to put into my body on tour, multiple times a day.

Yeah, I can't do that anymore. Even on the last tour, I was starting to hurt just because there were a couple times where I had, I don't know, like, a Buc-ee's wrap.

That's kind of the good shit, but maybe not good enough.

I mean, it is definitely a step up from Loves or something. But it's still such garbage. They have this weird pastry. It's like a hot dog baked into the pastry with cheese and jalapenos and stuff and I remember my tour manager, who was like 22, was eating one for breakfast. If I did that I'd be shitting my pants by one or two.

I think as you get older, your stomach just can't handle things. 

Yeah, I've definitely reached the “thinking about the future” stage of aging.

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