The Metro Theatre doesn’t sell out for just anything – but Machine Girl isn’t just anything. Last week’s show felt like an 8-bit summoning ritual. Shoulder to shoulder, a sea of goth, raver, e-kids and co. all packed in like they knew something the rest of the city didn’t.
Opening was Hobart’s Quest Master, and I was just as excited to see them as the headliner. Their set was purified fantasy synth escapism – the perfect soundtrack for your next DnD campaign, but also exactly what you’d want playing at a party. Actual world-building, and a beautiful niche, with merch to match. It was genuinely transportive like you’re suddenly deep inside a world with its own lore. You could feel everyone around you tuning into the same frequency, heads gently nodding, phones down.
For the uninitiated, Machine Girl is the brainchild of Matt Stephenson, and it’s hard to explain what they do without sounding like you’re listing genres out of a blender: breakcore, hardcore, noise, punk, industrial, glitch, 16-bit video game boss music. All of it, all at once, all very fast. But none of that really captures what it feels like which is more like getting bodyslammed into a cartoon dimension where nothing makes sense and your adrenaline has nowhere to go.
Stephenson came on stage swinging. Within seconds he was leaping into the pit, flinging himself across the stage. Sean Kelly on drums was a machine in the truest sense, as well as newest member Lucy Caputi on guitar. It was exhausting just watching them.
There weren’t really “songs” in the traditional sense. It was more like a constant stream of mutation. One track bled into the next with zero pause – breakcore collapsed into hardcore collapsed into total noise. If you lost track for a second, you were five levels deep into something else. It was sweaty, disorienting, cartoonishly aggressive.
In the crowd, someone was filming on a Nintendo DS. Another person was clutching a Kuromi plush like it was a life jacket. Every second of the show was ridiculous – overstimulating in a way that short-circuited your critical brain and left only a fight-or-flight response.
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