femtanyl’s method for cover art involves doing an illustration and then using a phone to take a picture of it on the computer screen, spawning cruddy little Moiré pattern grids. It’s a good analog for femtanyl’s digital hardcore music: bitcrushed, compressed, spewing and screaming to a doomsday drum thwack. But while the artwork—femtanyl’s trademark feline creature Token engulfed by flames—still teems with digital artifacts, the music on this debut album seems keen to transcend the screen. MAN BITES DOG might be at the laptop rave, but it’s thinking about body-bashing in a dank DIY venue.
Noelle Mansbridge is assisted here by Juno Callendar, who arrived as a live drummer and now plays multiple instruments and helps produce. Callendar studied sound design, and she plays the theory savant to Mansbridge’s self-described vibe-master. On MAN BITES DOG, the unruly femtanyl sound is pulled taut and stretched out: The four-on-the-floors smack like spiky cleats and the rave stabs strike like a coordinated shower of knives. Many of Mansbridge’s older tracks were two minutes long if that, but her jacked-up confidence means MAN BITES DOG has a few that nearly reach four.
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The production is raw but precise, a mechanical bull with adjustable shocks. “Helltarget” opens with bulbous bass pads that instruct the listener to gird their loins, before the drums crash in and Mansbridge’s vocals stagger onto the scene. The next three minutes loop cyberpunk synths while flashing between ideas: a brain-smacking rap-screamo section; a vaporwavey dream hole; a movie sample. Halfway through, everything slows down and you think it’s over—but no, like Six Flags Twisted Colossus, there’s a second drop. By the ride’s end, you’re gasping for air, a little puke stirring in the belly. Now repeat for nine more songs that are sometimes thrilling and sometimes too much—beats wound beyond the point of pleasure, mixes overwhelmed with shrapnel.
You could say the music has caught up with Mansbridge’s perennially scary lyrics, a nightmare gallery of caskets, peeled-off skin, and viscous gut-fluid. “Body the Pistol” envisions the human body as a weapon shooting out blood and bones and stomach matter. In a recent interview, Mansbridge underlined the need for trans people everywhere to make their presence known in defiance against a government trying to eliminate them. You might view femtanyl’s music through the lens of body horror, a genre many trans people appreciate for how it captures gender dysphoria and the feeling that your flesh is alien, something corrosive. But here, the body isn’t a site of discomfort so much as destruction—a flamethrower ready to ignite.
This album also sounds like two DIY scene vets trying to prove their punk bona fides. The hyper-rave hi-jinks of Machine Girl and digital hardcore OGs like Atari Teenage Riot loomed large before, but now it’s also the cybergrind screamo of Blind Equation. The warped thrum of “Video Nasty” recalls the empty-room eeriness of the Deli Girls’ “Officer.” Apart from “Shows You the Way to the Hiway,” a highlight that’s like femtanyl approximating pop, the atmosphere is mostly deep and dark, heavy on evil clanks and clatter. “City” shakes like a meat grinder chopping up monster limbs as layers of voices both heroic and hellish gasp for attention. “Sick of It” has the beefy synth bassline of an aughts electroclash anthem, filtered through the brain of someone obsessed with the gnarly edge of LustSickPuppy and horrorcore RPGs.
MAN BITES DOG unloads a rush of peaks: the glittery old-skool stabs of “Head Up,” the hardgore shrieks and sickly torrent of leeches and vomit on “Body the Pistol.” Mansbridge’s serrated guitar cuts through the mix like a glowing blade. But the textures also start to get too uniformly shadowy, the beats too stiff. Mansbridge’s earlier EPs were hooky yet haywire, animated by pulpy carnage like the ravenous scream ripping across “Katamari,” or a sedate lilt caressing the feral aggression on “Its Time.” When femtanyl try a similar trick with overlapping vocals on “Is This It,” it gets lost in the speedfreak density. The slapdash euphoria that electrified 2024’s REACTOR comes in small doses here. When femtanyl’s music first broke out, haters called it Geometry Dash brainrot (and what’s so wrong with that?), but the more apt critique was “’90s rave pastiche.” MAN BITES DOG aims to beat both allegations, and for the most part it gets there. It also feels like femtanyl are still searching for their final form.
