REVIEW: Machine Girl – PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X

More devil may care than ever: Machine Girl’s most invigorating output in years

47:00 // October 24th, 2025 // Future Classic

Rest assured that I hate the spirit of the following remark more than you do, but: PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X should not hit nearly as hard as it does! It does next to nothing to shift any of the emphatically longstanding preconceptions I’ve had about Machine Girl as a project, preeminent bridge between ratty, overstimulated e-jank and IRL nerd anaerobics that it is, yet it still plays as their most refreshing outing since 2022’s career highlight Neon White OST 1. Much as last year’s MG Ultra was a brisk, if tongue-in-cheek walkthrough of everything we knew and [ideally still] loved about Machine Girl’s take on breakbeat hardcore, ticking all the boxes without adding anything essential to the canon, PsychoWarrior… shoots for a streamlined, memeified refinement of the digital hardcore stampede the duo-now-trio first blasted out on 2017’s ...Because I’m Young Arrogant and Hate Everything You Stand For.

Woah woah woah, digital hardcore vs. breakbeat hardcore?

for what it’s worth, you could argue that the RAISON DETRE of current-era Machine Girl is to blur the lines between the two, but if you crumble each cookie separately:

digihxc --> [punk] hardcore gone digital, has guitars and yells, you mosh to it, smells like B.O. and Mountain Dew

breakbeat hxc --> [rave] hardcore rooted in (shock horror) steady breakbeats, very much in the tradition of dance rather than rock music, frequently confused with breakcore*, smells like Red Bull and menthol smokes

*aka what happens if you stick steady breakbeats in a microwave and slap an epilepsy warning on whatever comes out — not our plat du jour today.

Truth is, I’d found myself more than a little tired of the tried n tested Machine Girl formula on MG Ultra and the following Super FREQ EP — both were worthy enough testaments to Matt Stephenson and co.’s production wizardry, breakneck energy and goofball humour, but there’s only so far you can go with lurid dopamine crimes before your audience’s nervous pathways start to fray and the critical judgement of dialled in starts to pack more punch than any of that sensory goodtimes shit. Machine Girl’s discography has deceptive breadth – you’ll never find yourself reaching for the evasive zaniness of 2015’s Gemini for the same fix as 2020’s effervescent RePorpoised Phantasies – but staring down the prospect of diminishing returns on the self-aware hyperactivity that sits at the heart of practically all of it, I pencilled in a respectful timeout.

One year on, to hell with that! While I cannot argue in good conscience that PsychoWarrior… is in any way an advancement on Machine Girl’s mosh blueprint, or even that it’s a better or worse record than MG Ultra if you push your specs up and parse it like a stooge, it is perhaps the most convinced I’ve ever been by the group’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink propensities and their increasingly virulent rejection of anything approaching self-seriousness. Translation: this is an irresistibly fun record that cares not at all about restraint, tastefulness, dignity, or even stylistic consistency beyond the central premise of headbanger-meets-computer-screen; it plays like a riot as such where MG Ultra felt overly in-tune with its own meta, and it thrives on (almost) every one of its full slophouse’s worth of thrills and spills.

Granted, the record opens on something of a bum note with snotty pouting and stomping redolent of Trent Reznor in the stankest bowels of his ‘90s seethe era, but from the moment the following “Come On Baby, Scrape My Data” barrels in, the party simply does not let up. From its tunes to its branding, PsychoWarrior… serves up one hoot after another: song titles range from the perma-pubescent “We Don’t Give A Fuck” to the downright unpardonable “Despite Having No Money at All I’m Just Another Rat in the Mall”; lyrics follow suit (WANNA KNOW ME? WANNA OWN ME? WANNA CLONE ME? FUCK YOU, YOU CAN BLOW ME!); bangers bang as sweaty vocals yelp dorky soundbytes; supercharged refrains do anything but; guitars are more than audible (new addition Lucy Caputi most certainly pulls her weight); glitch or noise SFX frequently drop in to remind us exactly what level of emaciated attention span the target audience is expected to house.

Though you could just as easily write it off as scattergun, the album’s diversity goes a long way towards its entertainment value. I typically find myself phasing out of Machine Girl’s digital hardcore material within around five minutes of any given encounter, regardless of quality, single-wavelength digital onslaughts being what they are, but this PsychoWarrior…’s refusal to stick to any given lane keeps its appeal fresh throughout. Just you try making it through a full spin without paying some mind to each track’s swerves and curves! This relentless channel shifting poses a rare challenge to Machine Girl’s hallowed role as a background gamer jam — some may call it a (very) fleeting miracle of attention for those typically incapable of focusing on anything, and as such I have a lot of time for how much each song brings to table (and, by extension, for the eyebrow-raising number of tracks). See the following for a tenuously abridged list of ear-prickers:

• “Ignore the Vore” [sic] and later, less memorably, “...Rat in the Mall” ride dizzy, Melt-Banana-adjacent grooves with appropriate increments of glee.

• Wub-ridden and bouncy as all hell, “Rabbit Season” shows Machine Girl’s poppier side at its most infectious.

• “Psychowar” cruises on such a blundering, idiotic mess of a riff that it makes Limp Bizkit’s most retrograde hogwash look like a metaphysics thinktank by comparison. Needless to say, shit rips.

• “Phantom Doom” is essentially the album’s dumping ground for lurid melodic hooks; it smacks of cheap lager and World of Warcraft, and even as someone who only cares about the former half of that equation, it begs a nudge of the replay button like nothing else.

• “Dread Architect” struts a hotly-tipped collab with squwark-addled degeneration artist Drumcorps, and hold my beer extra tight don’t we fucking know it.

The upshot of all this is a callous barrage of brainless gratification that perfectly suits every one of my Machine Girl-shaped needs in 2025, but could just as easily rub more reverent fans the wrong way (and I don’t even want to think about how this will sit with po-faced current-year tourists). PsychoWarrior… takes itself as seriously as it deserves (which is to say almost not at all) and backs itself with enough joyous excess not to fall into stale self-parody; I do not care to discover whether it will stand the test of time as more than a brash set of cheap thrills — it’s charmingly dumb and authentically fun, and quite frankly that’s more than most of us can say for ourselves. Go fish.

7/10

Further listening:

Machine Girl - ...Because I’m Young Arrogant and Hate Everything You Stand For
Nemlesss - Bosss Rush Core
MSPAINT - Post-American
Melt-Banana - Return of 13 Hedgehogs (MxBx Singles 2000-2009)
Atari Teenage Riot - Delete Yourself!