There exists a certain species of electronic music that has been embalmed by its own admirers, preserved beneath enough black clothing, antique drum machines, and solemn references to 1981 that you half expect the Smithsonian to issue the next twelve-inch. Mercury Girl’s latest single Spirit Forward escapes that mausoleum because Aaron Pena sounds less interested in curating the past than in using its machinery to pick a fight with the present.
Pena, the Filipino American San Diego musician behind Mercury Girl, works with the familiar furniture of cold wave: stiff percussion, bass lines that keep walking even when the room feels empty, synthesizers that seem permanently one bad voltage spike away from collapse. Spirit Forward, however, has a wiry nervous energy that puts it somewhere between Black Marble’s private unease, the laboratory pop of Oppenheimer Analysis, Tom Vek’s angular minimalism, and the sideways rhythmic intelligence of Talking Heads. The bass carries most of the physical argument, a rubbery little engine repeating itself beneath chords that keep looking upward as though expecting an answer from a ceiling full of dead fluorescent tubes.
The question is the oldest one available: “What’s the meaning of all of this?” Pena understands that asking it in 2026 means pushing through advertising, algorithms, compulsory self-branding, endless feeds, and the faint suspicion that somebody has already converted your existential crisis into a subscription tier. Its beat suggests motion without destination, which turns out to be a useful musical equivalent for living inside a culture forever promising connection while quietly perfecting isolation.
“This song mirrors the frustrations I, and I’m sure many others, have had when trying to make sense of life and the meaning behind it, especially in a world so enveloped with distracting you from doing so,” says Pena. “We’re all fed ideas about who and what we should be; this song rejects those expectations.”
Pena recorded the material with vintage synthesizers and half-working sequencers, and you can hear the appeal of equipment that misbehaves, because human uncertainty sounds better when the machines possess a little uncertainty of their own. The arrangement has space, but never comfort; every open patch seems to leave another philosophical bill unpaid.
Listen to Spirit Forward below and order the single here.
Ahead of Mercury Girl’s debut album, A NuTone, Spirit Forward makes a persuasive case for Pena as a songwriter who understands that cold wave can still carry blood, doubt, humour, and the embarrassing human need to ask enormous questions while the drum machine keeps perfect time.
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