Album Review: Bots

Bots is the latest release from Ōtautahi/Christchurch songwriter, musician, and producer Pickle Darling (Lukas Mayo). It has been described as “their most intricate and lovingly chaotic work yet”, and it absolutely is.

But getting there wasn’t easy. It was never the plan to break a laptop in the process of making this album – but that’s exactly what happened. Despite the tracks sounding deceptively simple, they’re packed with more data than your average Pink Floyd live show.

In the making, Mayo’s machine gave up under the weight of heavy, unwieldy files filled with chopped-up notes, warped vocals, and diffracted loops. Some songs, according to the liner notes, “weren’t finished so much as abandoned.”

Which seems fitting. Because if you listen closely, this album is about breaking apart – about the friction and collapse of relationships. So maybe it makes sense that creating it came with a little destruction of its own.

From the first few notes, you get that vibe. “And every time I operate / The control panel inside my brain I just / Cut the wrong cord / And if I could communicate / To you through happiness and jagged shapes”, sings Mayo on Obsolete, over a grainy voice memo from Ava Mirzadegan, tiny one-note twinkles, and simple guitar strokes.

Bots begins, and ends with cleverly-constructed looping metallic music box notes, and dinky-di back beats. Layered over that are multitudes of samples, sketchy airplay from lost tape recordings, and distorted vocals squeezed through various nefarious treatments.

Even those cybertronic megabytes have a tender side. MP3 is such a short phrase for a warehouse of human emotion. You can’t just zip up a file and press send. Multiple listens are mandatory to get under the surface of these songs.

Seek out the off-kilter, softly sung/spoken vocals and the vulnerable, nerve-touching lyrics. It would be easy to dismiss the minimalist instrumentation as another self-indulgent bedroom production – but after all the pain and friction it took to create this album, the battle with the bots has been won. They couldn’t crash the system or stymie creativity this time.

Tracks like Earthshaped are misleadingly simple – just a guitar, voice, and a synthetic recreation of a Casio-tone keyboard using Logic Pro. The last time I heard that keyboard sound was on Trio’s Da Da Da. Could this be a secret homage?

Each listen reveals more. Tiny sonic layers emerge – what sounds like a recorder sneaking through the chorus is actually lots of chopped up guitar, kalimba and synths.

The recent single Violence Voyager is built from chiming loops. Its softness is deceptive, reminiscent of groups like Test Dept, who use familiar audio and nostalgia to create something slightly disarming. The video, directed by Christiane Shortal, leans into the surreal and ethereal. Mayo called it “a low-poly ode to nature, and the feeling of connecting to something greater. We took our little PS1 mascot and brought them to transcendence.”

Congratulations Champion is a charming love song, a modern minstrel’s sonnet with a deadpan Kiwi twist:

“An Oscar for Jane Campion / I found a note written in crumbs inside a biscuit tin / You know I’m gonna love you still / Like black mould loves the window sill / Like oceans love an oil spill / Like ducks towards an air rifle.”

And if there weren’t enough 80’s references already, check out Human Bean Instruction Manual, which borrows heavily from early arcade soundtracks. I’m pretty sure those are the alien-kill chords from Galaga anchoring the chorus. To me, the backing vocals sound like a distorted mimicry of the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. Whatever, I love this effect.

Mayo has always been album focused. To them, songs belong in a set – not as quick, consumable memes for TikTok to assume, consume, and exhume. Rather than chasing viral hits, Mayo builds albums as cohesive worlds. And here, they continue the journey that began in 2016 with Oh Golly Gosh, It’s The Beatles, and then continued with Spring Onion Pancakes (2017), Bigness (2019), Cosmonaut (2021), and the glossy studio produced Laundromat (2023); each release pushing sonic boundaries and emotional depth.

Bots is a return to the hard-drive studio, exploring the friction between the digital and the organic. It makes you question how much of our lives exist in the ‘real’ world versus the digital one – whatever that means. The title Bots refers to “clashing ideologies – internally and externally, between the past and present versions”. It’s about what lies in between – what we say online versus what we feel now. How can anyone trust us to change if every thought or expression is recorded forever and accessible in every pocket?

These fragments exist in our digital lives and in our flesh-and-blood selves. Mayo brings them all together for us to hold, listen to, navigate, and consume – slowly and carefully. After all, the songs on this album – held together with digital sticky tape, feeling, emotion, and hope – are all song exploders, in reverse.

Bots is where the digital and organic collide – raising questions about identity, memory, and connection in a world where everything is recorded. It’s a glitchy, gorgeous triumph.