Ōtautahi/Christchurch songwriter Pickle Darling (Lukas Mayo) announces with their most intricate and lovingly chaotic work yet – Battlebots, out September 5 via US indie label Father/Daughter Records. The latest single ‘Violence Voyager’ taken from the album, is built on chiming loops and disarming softness. Its video, directed by Christiane Shortal, stretches that feeling into something dreamlike and surreal. Mayo describes it as “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.”
Speaking on the video, Mayo says: “It’s 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.”
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 its 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.
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.
To mark the release, Pickle Darling will play a series of intimate in-store shows around Aotearoa – just Lukas and a guitar, stripped-back and tender:
September 5th – Slowboat Records, Wellington – 4.30pm
September 6th – Flying Out, Auckland – 2.00pm
September 11th – Penny Lane Records, Christchurch
Pickle Darling - 'Violence Voyager' (Official Video)
Listen / Download: https://pickledarling.lnk.to/violencevoyager