Lukas Mayo didn't set out to break their laptop while making Battlebots, but in the end, the machine just couldn't take it. Files became too heavy, too unwieldy, too layered with chopped-up guitar notes, warped voice memos, and fractured drum loops. Some songs weren't finished so much as abandoned, because the computer simply refused to open them anymore. That moment felt fitting. An album about breaking apart, about friction and collapse, should probably come with a little destruction of it's own.
Pickle Darling has always existed just outside of the periphery. In a heightened time of fast music, algorithmic consumption and rapid virality, Mayo has remained focused on the album. Their discography is a reflection of their creative evolution, and they deliberately look for ways to push sonic boundaries from release to release. Since debuting with Bigness in 2019 followed by Cosmonaut in 2021, Mayo has curated a catalog that is deeply personal and strangely tactile, where tiny, unexpected details-an off-kilter loop, a whispered aside, the warmth of an old Casio-become as crucial as melody itself. Their 2023 LP Laundromat was a precise and polished expansion of that world, a record that felt like it had been carefully placed behind glass. It garnered praise from Mojo, Rolling Stone Australia, The Line of Best Fit, and led to a live performance on the beloved New Zealand children's TV program, What Now. Battlebots, by contrast, is unruly and full of static: a collection of songs that feel like they could only ever exist on scratched CD-Rs passed between friends. Self-recorded in their home studio in Christchurch, New Zealand, Battlebots finds Mayo taking a scalpel to their own songwriting. Instead of simply playing guitar, they recorded each note individually, then arranged them one by one. Songs were stretched, chopped, reversed. Some ideas started as "unlistenable garbage" before morphing into something unexpectedly beautiful. If a song felt too straightforward, Mayo had to mess it up. "After Laundromat, I was tired of 'the song,'" Mayo explains. "I wanted to avoid capturing a performance as much as possible, everything had to be fragments, and I wanted to show as much of the recording and editing process as possible, leaving all the seams exposed." The result is an album that feels like a glitch in the system, pushing against past constraints while embracing the weird, beautiful mess of making something new. That friction of old and new, organic and digital, melody and noise is what drives Battlebots. Mayo drew inspiration from a strange, scattered lineage: Four Tet's Rounds, The Books, Neneh Cherry's Broken Politics, The Wrens' Three types of reading ambiguity, but also the emotional directness of 2000s pop like Madonna's Ray of Light and Robyn's Body Talk. The album opens with "Obsolete," featuring a voice memo from songwriter Ava Mirzadegan. It takes a full two minutes before Mayo's voice emerges, hesitant but clear. Later, there's "Massive Everything," which Mayo describes as the closest they've ever come to writing a pop song. And then there's Battlebots' most striking couplet, from "Congratulations Champion": "You know I'm gonna love you still / Like black mold loves the windowsill." It's as sweet as a strawberry on the edge of rotting. The title Battlebots itself is a reference to clashing ideologies-internally and externally, between past and present versions, between the desire to create something and the frustration of the process. It's a reflection of how our thoughts never settle, how music is never really about one singular thing, how an album can hold a hundred tiny conflicts at once. And in that way, it mirrors life itself. It's an album built from fragments, from warped sounds and half-memories, stitched together into something that still somehow pulses with life. It's not just a standalone piece, it's another chapter in the world Pickle Darling has been quietly building all along.