From the first second the opening track to Intruder, “Embers,” reverberates to life, it’s clear that The Beta Machine’s arrival means something different.
Founded by keyboardist Matt McJunkins and drummer Jeff Friedl, of A Perfect Circle, and rounded out by vocalist Claire Acey and guitarist/keyboardist Nicholas Perez, The Beta Machine’s debut album expertly balances a metallic heart with achingly genuine verses, sustaining a surging dance floor rhythm underneath raw anthemic emotion. It’s an intoxicating blend.
On “Embers” especially, Friedl’s masterful control of percussion battens down the hatches for the storm of electronica and rock above it, stretching and compressing tempo to heighten the album’s sense of drama. Intruder seems most interested in creating a soundscape, an aural world demanding rumination as easily as a frenzied dance, and it succeeds. McJunkins and Acey make a reliably powerful duet, with most of the songs featuring both their voices trading lyrics and vocalizations within The Beta Machine’s futuristic harmonies. “Someday” is shot through with a cinematic want, “The Fall” questions the nature of power as it plays out like Led Zeppelin melded with house music, and album standout, “Bones,” slows the album down for just a few minutes, allowing room for the most painful love song on the album to grow sky-high with an electrifying presence.
The Beta Machine is a band of artists at their peak creativity feeding off of each other, and Intruder is the logical conclusion of such a band forming: an album that prizes the extremes of human emotion—longing, doubt, love, fear—and celebrates them with a sound both ethereal and arresting.
Before the album’s release, Popdust was able to speak with Matt McJunkins, The Beta Machine’s frontman, to give context to the band’s sound, the themes on Intruder, and the work that led to this album at this moment in time:
Considering Intruder is a debut album, what context would you want to give for fans listening to rock in this day and age? Where do you locate yourselves as a rock band?
Well, we started a bit of context with our EP All This Time back in 2017. So this new album is an extension of that but also growing away from it. Moving forward and creating a new sound for ourselves and always evolving. And we’d rather let people take away what they’d like from it, rather than tell them what it’s going to be or how they should listen to it. We write songs that excite us and are influenced by our own experiences or whatever we might be listening to at the time.
Do you imagine Intruder as a discrete set of tracks, or is there a concept or narrative tying them together as a unit? What would you like listeners to learn from this?
It’s a snapshot in time – not a concept album at all. But there is a loose theme that tends to show itself in most of the material. All of it stems from personal tragedy, conflict, or some kind of inner turmoil usually. Most of the songs are maybe our own way of trying to come to grips with something or to try and address some kind of problem. Not trying to provide a definitive solution or answers for anybody including ourselves.
How do you think the fact that so many of you have worked in or with other bands informs The Beta Machine’s sensibility? Is Intruder the product of years of learning, or is it more of a fresh start?
We’re always learning. This album is a sum of its parts and a great deal of those parts is made up of our previous work with other artists. So, of course, there is an influence there. But we also listen to a lot of music that exists outside of that world and that really shows through on this album. This is us putting our stick in the mud and claiming our own sound. We started that process in 2017 and this is a way of solidifying it once and for all.
Check out the video for their lead single, “Embers.”
The Beta Machine – Emberswww.youtube.com
Matthew Apadula is a writer and music critic from New York. His work has previously appeared on GIGsoup Music and in Drunk in a Midnight Choir. Find him on Twitter @imdoingmybest.
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