Artist: Unify Separate
Title: Kill the Machine
Genre: Electro Pop / Synth Pop
Release Date: 12th December 2025
Label: Self-released
Single Review
Time to ‘Kill the Machine’, before it kills us. Ready to fight back?
Also, with the third advance single from their EP ‘The God Particle’, due in early 2026, Leo Josefsson and Andrew Montgomery are making no compromises. The Stockholm Synth duo UNIFY SEPARATE use ‘Kill the Machine’ to address the dominance of Big Tech and the growing influence of artificial intelligence on our lives, our society, and our culture, and wrap it all in an anthemic Electro Pop song - cinematic, dark, menacing, and defiant.
Screaming, forward-driving synths form the framework. The verses rest on heavy, darkly pulsating baselines that create a constant inner tension. Andrew Montgomery’s urgent vocals convey the warning with clarity and force: “We thought we controlled you / We knew nothing”. A heavily distorted, machine-like voice responds: “You knew nothing” - with an arrogance that seems almost to mock us. Echo effects reinforce the sense of an expansive force that is barely controllable.
“You were biding time / Waiting for the time / To take over” - technology designed to relieve, support, or even protect us is gradually turning into an uncontrollable threat. This idea links thematically to familiar dystopian narratives: as in ‘Terminator’ or ‘Matrix’, a technological antagonist lurks in the background, analysing, collecting, waiting - until the moment arrives when humans have almost no room for action left. The chorus “We’re holding on to something that we long since gave away” describes this powerlessness precisely. It marks the realisation that the loss of control occurred long before the actual collapse.
Towards the end, the song raises the aggression level. The repeated command “Kill the Machine” grows more urgent with every repetition. Additional vocal lines, ever-denser synth walls and the driving bass make the arrangement increasingly demanding and combative. The build-up recalls, in its dramaturgy, cinematic end-time sequences - soundscapes that convey resistance and downfall at the same time. The fightback starts here.
In doing so, ‘Kill the Machine’ positions itself clearly within the current discourse on AI. On the one hand, it holds enormous potential, for example in medicine. On the other, it carries uncontrollable dangers. Especially in the arts, the use of AI can ease workflows and open up new possibilities. At the same time, there is the risk of diluting what defines art: unpredictability, a spirit of experimentation, the willingness to take risks and personal experiences and feelings.
Aesthetic uniformity and cultural flattening loom. We risk being flooded with music derived from probabilities rather than experience and intuition - mass-produced, efficient, and uniform. ‘Kill the Machine’ functions as a protest against the sheer volume of algorithmically generated content - a system that creates but does not understand, that recombines but feels nothing, that lives “from our suffering”.
‘Kill the Machine’ is a powerful, atmospherically dense Electro Pop track that convincingly fuses musical force with thematic sharpness. UNIFY SEPARATE sketch a modern, cinematic scenario while simultaneously issuing a call to resistance. The single is an intense contribution to the current debate on Big Tech and AI and a strong statement from a band that places its artistic instinct firmly against algorithmic arbitrariness. The single sharpens our view of the dark sides of technological dominance and delivers a clear message: art lives through the human - and that must be defended.
Line-up
Andrew Montgomery – Vocals
Leo Josefsson – Keyboards, Vocals
Website
https://www.unifyseparate.com / https://www.facebook.com/usmusicspace
Cover Picture
Rating
Music: 10
Sound: 10
Total: 10 / 10
