Miss Grit’s debut album, Follow the Cyborg, reflects on a life shaped by technology, rendering the nonbinary, Korean-American artist’s ideas via metaphors inspired by anime, including Kon Satoshi’s Perfect Blue, and critical theorist Donna Haraway’s concept of “cyborg feminism.” While the album fits neatly into the current indie-pop landscape, its songs don’t rely on traditional repeated hooks, instead unfurling more organically.
Miss Grit’s electric guitar plays a key role throughout Follow the Cyborg, integrated seamlessly into the album’s largely electronic production. The distortion on songs like “Nothing’s Wrong” and “Lain (phone clone)” is cold and heavily digitized, and the mix is full of sudden electronic hisses and eruptions. The singer’s voice, which lands somewhere between that of Weyes Blood and Caroline Polachek, is an entry point into their music’s emotional spaces.
“Follow the Cyborg” and “Like You” bounce along in simultaneously enveloping and propulsive fashion, with the vocals, guitar, and drums striking at once to emphasize certain lyrics or accentuating pronouns like “I” and “you.” Elsewhere, the anthemic impulses of the dance-rock “Lain (phone clone)” are contrasted by lines like “I don’t want to see everything anymore/I don’t want to be everything anymore.” The song’s lyrics allude to the mind state of the titular character, an apparently ordinary teenage girl who ascends into transhumanist godhood.
Also of note, the quasi-power ballad “The End” begins on a subdued, almost dirge-like note but ascends with booming snares and Miss Grit’s repeated refrain of “for you,” while “Syncing” reprises a similar quiet-then-loud template. Unfortunately, the album’s avoidance of conventional pop structures means these songs fail to lodge in your mind, but Miss Grit sings with a plainspoken, almost whispery intimacy that’s hard to shake.
Follow the Cyborg uses its anime references to cut through the artificiality of binary ideas about gender and race: “What’s the point of being so profound/When all I’ll be is contained in this so vague membrane?” Miss Grit sings on “Lain (phone clone).” As conceptual as the album gets, though, it sticks to concrete dilemmas, like the effect of splitting oneself into private and public personas through technology on “Like You”: “There’s no escape/The world they simulate/They want a hold of you to dominate.” Follow the Cyborg renders the psychic impact of a culture where everyone, not just artists, feels like they’re in perpetual performance mode.
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