Ollie McSweeny, Staff Writer
Machine Girl ended their Psychowarrior USA tour on April 9th at Brooklyn Paramount, featuring Kumo 99 and Sextile as their opening acts. The band began their tour in late February in New Jersey before playing across the country and circling back to the East Coast. The tour promotes their most recent album that was released last October, PsychoWarrior: MG Ultra X, which succeeds their MG Ultra album that came out in 2024.
Machine Girl is a digital hardcore industrial punk band formed by Matthew Stephenson on Long Island in 2012. Stephenson is the lead vocalist, bassist, and producer of the band. Sean Kelly became a part of the band in 2012 as the drummer, and Lucy Caputi in 2024 on guitar. At Brooklyn Paramount, they opened with “We Don’t Give a Fuck”, “Come On Baby, Scrape My Data”, “Ignore the Vore”, and “Rabbit Season” from their latest album. They also played “Psychic Attack” and “Grindhouse” from their MG Ultra album as well as a few of their older songs such as “Scroll of Sorrow” and “Athoth a Go!! Go!!”.
Sextile is an electronic punk band from Los Angeles, California. Melissa Scaduto and Brady Keehn both provide vocals, guitar, and electronics for their music while Scaduto alone plays drums. The band was formed in 2015, and they took a hiatus in 2019 before making a comeback in 2022. During the concert they played “Contortion” and “Crassy Mel” from their Push album; “Women Respond to Bass” and “Rearrange” from yes, please. This show concluded their USA/Canada tour that began in late March. They will be performing at Le Festif in Quebec, Canada on July 25th.
Kumo 99 is a jungle and drum n bass punk band from Los Angeles, California featuring Japanese-American Ami Komai as the vocalist and Nate Donmoyer as both producer and electronics. Kumo 99 was the first to perform of the three bands at Brooklyn Paramount. Some of the songs they played include “Eyesore” and “The Distance between Me and You” from their latest album Pull; “Body N. Will”, “UUU”, and “Four Point Steel Star” from their album Body N. Will; “Dopamine Chaser” and “Gelus” from Headplate.
The show, lasting from 8:00pm to 11:00pm, had an incredibly chaotic and packed pit. Brady Keehn of Sextile frequently came up to the barricade to sing to the crowd, and Matt Stephenson jumped the barricade to crowd-surf several times. The bouncers at the barricade handed out water during intermissions and escorted anyone from the audience who crowd-surfed out of the venue, shining a spotlight on them to locate them in the crowd. The stage featured numerous strobe lights, artificial fog, and a statue of the PsychoWarrior from the album cover with a backdrop of the PsychoWarrior’s tech-wings.
People started lining up outside of the venue at around 4:00pm and the doors opened at 7:00pm. Brooklyn Paramount has a “no moshing” rule, but that didn’t stop the audience from creating a massive and intense mosh pit. During the show, Stephenson called out controversial world leaders like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu before performing the final song of the concert, “Suck Shit”.
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