Miss Grit wins timeliest album of the year; as Microsoft unveils its Bing chatbot and ChatGPT is growing faster than TikTok, the Queens-based artist has just released their debut, a concept album about a cybernetic organism gaining sentience and venturing out into the world. Told from the perspective of the often-female robot put at the mercy of its male creator, Follow the Cyborg is an examination and dismantling of sci-fi tropes structured around a printed circuit board of looped synths and guitars and Margaret Sohn's rigid, measured vocal delivery.
"Syncing" is the album's grand finale, breaking its established musical structure to center Sohn's voice free of programmed constraints. Built on a lullaby-sweet hum, when they sing, "I've never felt my own toes holding me entirely," their voice rising and stretching the length of notes for the first time, it's both a moment of liberation and an emotional narrative climax: A person, not merely a cyborg, grappling with the awe-inspiring magnitude of being alive in a body at last.
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